Dealing with Forms
One of the most powerful features of PHP is the way it handles
HTML forms. The basic concept that is important to understand
is that any form element in a form will automatically be available
to your PHP scripts. Please read the manual section on Variables
from outside of PHP for more information and examples on using
forms with PHP. Here is an example HTML form:
Example 2-6. A simple HTML form
<form action="action.php" method="post">
Your name: <input type="text" name="name"
/>
Your age: <input type="text" name="age"
/>
<input type="submit" />
</form>
There is nothing special about this form. It is a straight
HTML form with no special tags of any kind. When the user
fills in this form and hits the submit button, the action.php
page is called. In this file you would write something like
this:
Example 2-7. Printing data from our form
Hi <?php echo $_POST['name']; ?>.
You are <?php echo $_POST['age']; ?> years old.
A sample output of this script may be:
Hi Joe. You are 22 years old.
It should be obvious what this does. There is nothing
more to it. The $_POST['name'] and $_POST['age'] variables
are automatically set for you by PHP. Earlier we used the
$_SERVER autoglobal; above we just introduced the $_POST
autoglobal which contains all POST data. Notice how the
method of our form is POST. If we used the method GET then
our form information would live in the $_GET autoglobal
instead. You may also use the $_REQUEST autoglobal, if you
do not care about the source of your request data. It contains
the merged information of GET, POST and COOKIE data. Also
see the import_request_variables() function.
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