[RESOLVED] Php form handler error

[Mrikay]

Hi and thanks in advance. I'm a complete novice to this will be kids stuff to you guys and girls.

I'm trying to do a calculation on what a user fills out on one php page (index.php) and then print out the calculated value on another (page message.php). The problem is I'm getting the following error on the message.php page after submitting the form.

[INDENT]Parse error: syntax error, unexpected '=' in /www/zxq.net/c/a/r/mywebpage/htdocs/message.php[/INDENT]

This is the form code in my index.php page....

   <form action="message.php" name="loancalc" method="post">
    <br />
    <br />
    <br />
    <table style="border-collapse:collapse; padding:10px" width="100%" border="0">
  <tr style="padding:15px">
    <td colspan="2" align="center" valign="middle"><h3 style="padding-left:5px; padding-top:30px; color:#333333; size:14px">Loan Calculation Form</h3>

<p>Calculate your monthly loan payments</p>
<br /><hr width="50%" />
</td>
  </tr>
  <tr height="50px">
    <td width="50%" height="55" align="right" valign="middle">Required Loan Amount:</td>
    <td valign="middle"><input id="loan-amount" value="Loan amount" type="text" name="loan-amount" size="6"></td>
  </tr>
  <tr height="50px">
    <td width="50%" height="55" align="right" valign="middle">Over how long:</td>
    <td valign="middle"><input id="loan-period" type="text" value="Loan period" name="loan-period" size="6"></td>
  </tr>
  <tr height="55">
    <td height="42" colspan="2" align="center" valign="middle"><input id="submitbutton" name="submitbutton" type="submit" value="Calculate Payment"></td>
  </tr>
</table>
</form></td>

And this is the code in the page it goes to....

<?php  

								$loan-amount =  $_POST['loan-amount'] ;  

								$loan-period =  $_POST[['loan-period'] ;

							echo "<ul><li>".$loan-amount."</li><li>".$loan-peroid."</li></ul>";  
							?>  

Any ideas what I'm doing wrong?

[bradgrafelman]

Welcome to PHPBuilder! When posting PHP or HTML, please use the board's [noparse]

..

or

..

[/noparse] bbcode tags (respectively) as they make your code much easier to read and analyze.

As for your PHP script, I see a few issues:

1. PHP variable names can not contain hyphens. See the following manual page to learn more about variables: [man]variables.basics[/man].

2. You should always check to see if external data exists before you attempt to use it. One of the simple ways I often do this looks like this:

   $foo = ( isset( $_POST['foo'] ) ? $_POST['foo'] : NULL );

   This makes use of the ternary operator to only access the external data in $_POST if it actually exists.

3. Note that you've got an extra '[' opening brace here:

    $_POST[['loan-period'] ;

4. While you're fixing your variable name issues, note that 'period' is misspelled in the echo statement.

[Mrikay]

Thanks bradgrafelman, problem sorted. I see there is a Newbie section, perhaps I should have posted it there.

[bradgrafelman]

Glad you got it working. Don't forget to mark this thread resolved using the link on the Thread Tools menu above.

[Mrikay]

Done.