Question

Can any one please help me? I am new to php, currently I am trying to use $_POST['item'] to obtain a string (consists of many words) from a dropdown box and then process it. However, when I use $_POST['item'], only first word is returned, the rest of words are missing.

I have a dropdown box, something like:

echo "<form action='process_form.php' method='post'>";
echo "Select an item<br />";
echo "<select name='item' id='item'>";
...
...
...

each item in the dropdown box is a string that has product names like:

dressmaker mannequin size 12
torso mannequin in white color
...

User will then select an item from the dropdown box. When I used $_POST['item'] to obtain this string, I get the first word “dressmaker”, all the rests were missing.

How do I get the whole string?

Many thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I am not sure exactly what you are doing but I would do something like this. For this example I assume that the values “dressmaker mannequin size 12” will correspond to the values of the columns in the database to which I will refer to as “colA, colB, colC, and colD”, and in addition I assume you have an “ID” column in your database.

Here is the code I would use to generate the select drop-down list:

//$query is the variable storing the result of the mysql_query();
//assumption is that the result-set is non-empty

echo '<select name="item" id="item">\n'; //\n - new line character

//run through the loop to generate the items inside the list
while ($result = mysql_fetch_assoc($query)) {
    //note the id - it will be used to find data in the
    //database after the POST is complete

    //couple of temp variables (not necessary but makes code cleaner)
    $database_id = $result["ID"];
    $colA = $result["colA"]; //ex:dressmaker
    $colB = $result["colB"]; //ex:mannequin
    $colC = $result["colC"]; //ex:size
    $colD = $result["colD"]; //ex:12

    //add option to the select drop-down
    echo "<option value=\"$database_id\">$colA $colB $colC $colD</option>\n";
}
echo "</select>";

Now to retrieve the data from the POST. I am including the code Drewdin suggested.

//form was submitted already
//assumption is that the database connection is established
$item_id = mysql_real_escape_string(trim($_POST["item"]));

//Now get the info from the database for this id
//table is "table"
$string = "SELECT * FROM table WHERE ID = $item_id";
$query = mysql_query($string) or die("Could not complete the query: $string");

//assumption here is that the result set is non-empty
$result = mysql_fetch_assoc($query);

$colA = $result["colA"]; //ex:dressmaker
$colB = $result["colB"]; //ex:mannequin
$colC = $result["colC"]; //ex:size
$colD = $result["colD"]; //ex:12

//now you can use the values of colA-D to compute whatever you want

Hope this helps. Using database ids is nice for security plus it makes things more manageable.

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