fidling with strings

Anon

Hi,
Need some help and posibly ideas on making a component in a school project to work.
It goes like this: I want to use something like a pre-formated form that automaticly fills in some fields from a database. The idea is to use on things like filling out a declaration of mariage or sickness to take a lease from work were there are some fields like a persons name or phone number that is fetched from a database.
But I don´t want to make rigid forms so the whole deal will involve leting the user create a form and puting the calls to databases that he wants.
So as u can see it won´t be easy knowing what parts of the form will be stuff to get from the db and how many.
Well i´ve been getting on solving this and I´m thinking of using the php command Explode but have a doubt with it.
I´m thinking of using a For cycle to run by all the sub-strings Exploded but don´t know if it´s possible to know how much sub-string are made with this command.
And if anyone has diferent ideas on making the replaces I would sure apreciate it.

Anon

This would be a natural for Object Oriented Design. Each form field would be an object that knows how to display itself (Entry, Radio Button, etc), validate itself, retrieve it's value from the database, update the database, etc. Any form would just be a list of those objects.

There are articles around. Do some research first and comeback with more questions.

Anon

Well this is not that linear, u see I´m using php with Flash and the "form" will be made up in Flash inside a text field so that´s I was thinking in using a special characters to stand out the calls to a db.
Well what I still don´t know to make my aproach work is to know how to make the for/while cycle to end when there are no more outputs from the Exploded textfield.
I don´t know if Explode can give me the number of elements it makes, for me to set a limit to the cycle.
The "form" I´m trying to create is called a template.
Was the article u were talking about this: "Making forms object-oriented"?
Can Explode be tested for true or false?