loop form fields in counter

[condoug]

Hi all

I'm encountering a problem with collecting POST data from my form and need any help or advice you can give me.

I have 1 form and in that form I loop through my database of people and display form fields such as first name, last name, age, nationality etc and each form field is displayed as such:

// while loop here for each db record
<input type="text" name=firstname[$personid] />
<input type="text" name=lastnamename[$personid] />
<select name=nationality[$personid]></select>
// close while loop

Now, when I have mutiple people on my form, the POST array looks like this (below), but I do not know how to loop through each element and extract the correct values for each 'personid' to later use in an SQL query:

Array
(
    [firstname] => Array
        (
            [136] => Joe
            [139] => Jerry
        )

[lastname] => Array
    (
        [136] => Bloggs
        [139] => Bloggs
    )

[nationality] => Array
    (
        [136] => GBR
        [139] => ES
    )

[age] => Array
    (
        [136] => 23
        [139] => 43
    )

)

Can anyone who has more knowledge of dealing with POST arrays than me (!) help me here?

Many thanks for reading.
Doug

[cbj4074]

Have you looked at PHP's foreach() construct? That's all you need here (in addition to knowledge of how arrays are populated in PHP).

//Store the parsed data here.
$people = array();

//Suppose the array in your example is named $fields.
foreach ($fields as $key => $value) {
	foreach ($value as $id => $data) {
		$people[$id][$key] = $data;
	}
}

print_r($people);

Is that what you're looking for?

[bradgrafelman]

Might want to fix your HTML markup before you get too far along (hint: all attributes' values must be delimited by quotes); no sense in expecting PHP to receive POST'ed data reliably if your HTML isn't valid.

As for your question, here's one other way to do it:

$fields = array('firstname', 'lastname', 'nationality', 'age');
$IDs = array();

foreach($fields as $field) {
    if(!empty($_POST[$field] && is_array($_POST[$field]))
        foreach($field as $id)
            if(array_search((int)$id, $IDs) === FALSE)
                $IDs[] = (int)$id; // cast to (int) to make sure it's an integer
}

// $IDs is now a list of all unique 'id' values passed
// you can loop through the array and parse each ID as necessary, e.g.:

foreach($IDs as $id) {
    // process $id here
}

DISCLAIMER: Note that the above code was written off-the-cuff and is untested. :p