Question

After I add a button and a text field, how can I program that button to simply take what’s in the text box and put it into a variable? I have no idea how the button click event works.

<form id="form1" name="form1" method="post" action="">
  <label>
    <input type="submit" name="Searchbydistro" id="Searchbydistro" value="Submit" onclick="xxxxxxxxx " />
  </label>
  <label>
    <input type="text" name="txtboxsearchbydistro" id="txtboxsearchbydistro" />
  </label>
</form>

Would I put a PHP statement in the space where the xxxxxxxx is at?

Any help would be great!

Answer 1

You can’t execute PHP code in onclick() statements because PHP gets executed on the server, before the page is sent to the browser, and the onclick() function is exectued at the browser.

Solution would be (assuming this page is form.php) set the action of the form for “form.php” and on that page have

if(isset($_POST)){
   $variable = $_POST['txtboxsearchbydistro'];
   // Here you can run validation on $variable, sanitize it and pass it to a DB query
}