Get data from dynamic checkboxes

btk

Hi!

I'm trying to create a news system with the possibility of using checkboxes to determine if an article should be posted on the front page or not.

In the admin panel I list all news in the database using a while function, which prints a checkbox for each listing.

I've had some help with this, and the suggestion was to use arrays to retrieve the data from the checkbox.

<input type="checkbox" 
<? if ($frontpage == 'Yes') { ?>  checked="checked" <? } ?> name="checkbox<? echo "$j";?>" value="<? echo "$id";?>" />

When trying to retrieve the data from the checkbox, I've created a similar while function with the following code:

while ($j < $num) 
	{ $value	= $_POST['checkbox'];
	  echo "$value[$j]"; $j++; }

This doesn't give me any data in return.

Input and help would be much appreciated.

Weedpacket

No, because none of your checkboxes are named "checkbox".

Name them like so:

<input ... name="checkbox[<?php echo $j?>]" >

And you'll have your array, the keys of which will be the $j's of the checked boxes.

Res

Not directly asked for, but the direction your heading you may be interested to know:
you can use hidden fields with the same name/index to pass a default value. So for instance, if you wanted to know what boxes were checked, and which were unchecked, your code would look like this.

<input type="hidden" name="checkbox[1] value="0" />
<input type="checkbox" name="checkbox[1] value="1" />

The hidden input must come first. This is good for editing data, once the users have checked the check box to add the news, they can comeback and uncheck it to remove the news. Normally a check box value is only sent when it is checked. This allows the value of 0 to be passed by the hidden input, unless the check box has been checked, it will overwrite the 0 with the value of the check box, because they both have the same name.