Textarea and PHP variable trouble.

[XadrianZ]

I've got a few simple forms on a page with the basic purpose of inputting some text into a <textarea> and having it get submitted to a MySQL DB and post somewhere (messages, forums, page headers, etc.).

However, if the first character in the <textarea> is a number, it only puts that number into the PHP variable. So far example if I put in "123 Hello world!" into <textarea name=abc> and then did an echo($abc) the output would be "123".

Any ideas on how to fix this?

[Weedpacket]

Not without seeing the code that is broken.

[XadrianZ]

Sure, here's one example:

if(isset($header)){
	if(isset($clear)){
		dbn("update se_games set game_message='' where db_name='$db_name'");
		$hm_str .= "Game Messaged Cleared<br/></br/>";
	}
	if(isset($monkies)){
		echo($newmessage);
		dbn("update se_games set game_message='$newmessage' where db_name='$db_name'");
		$hm_str .= "Game Message Updated<br/></br/>";
	}
	db("select game_message from se_games where db_name='$db_name'");
	$hmessage=dbr();
	$hm_str .= "<form action=admin.php?header=1 method=post>";
	$hm_str .= "<textarea name='newmessage' rows=10 cols=40>$hmessage[game_message]</textarea>";
	$hm_str .= "<br/><input type=submit value=Submit>";
	$hm_str .= "<input type=hidden name=monkies value=1>";
	$hm_str .= "</form>";
	$hm_str .= "<br/><a href=admin.php?header=1&clear=1>Clear Header Message</a>";
	$hm_str .= "<br/><br/><b class=b1></b> = <b class=b1>Colored Text</b><br/>";
	$hm_str .= "<b class=b5></b> = <b class=b5>Colored Text</b><br/>";
	$hm_str .= "<b class=b6></b> = <b class=b6>Colored Text</b><br/><br/>";
	$hm_str .= "(Varries by color scheme)";
	$hm_str .= "<br/><br/><a href=admin.php>Back to Admin Page</a>";
	print_page("Edit Message",$hm_str);
}

print_page() is a function that generates the rest of the page (menu, header, etc.) and puts the $hm_str as the pages content. The if statement is run through the URL, in this case admin.php?header=1

[Weedpacket]

Well, first of all you should be getting the contents of the submitted from from $[man]_POST[/man]; maybe you're already doing this and populating $header, $newmessage etc. from it, in which case the mangling might be happening at that point. That's all I can see from here, since the echo() is the first time that $newmessage is mentioned and you say it's already corrupt by that point.

Other observations:

You aren't quoting your attribute values, which is a common cause of form-submitted strings being truncated, but I don't see that being the cause here.

Are you properly escaping your data before embedding it into the SQL statement? If not, an apostrophe in $newmessage for example would cause all sorts of grief.

On an efficiency note, I notice that you update the message and then immediately retrieve the message from the database - even though you already have it. Is this necessary?