Question

Hey so I am trying to grab the user input text within a textarea but it is not working out too well. What is happening is that we are grabbing a text (movie review) from our server and we want the user to be able to update it and then send it back to the server. Anyone know what we are doing wrong??
We arent getting any error, it just that we are unable to grab the textarea field data. We are pretty new to php and html so I am assume it is some small typeo we are overlooking.

UPDATE: Full fills here.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21443163/Reviews.php

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/21443163/updateReview.php

while($RecordSetMovieRow = odbc_fetch_array($RecordSetMovie))
        {
            echo "<tr>";
                $review = $RecordSetMovieRow['Review'];
                echo "<td align = 'center'>" . $RecordSetMovieRow['FirstName']. $RecordSetMovieRow['LastName']  . "</td>";
                echo "<td align = 'center'><textarea name = 'textarea' rows = '5' cols= '40'>" . $review . "</textarea></td>";
                $textarea = $_GET['textarea'];
                $u = $Re[0];
                echo "<td><form action = 'updateReview.php?id=".$RecordSetMovieRow['ReviewID']."&review=$textarea' method = 'POST'><input type='submit' value='Update'></form></td>";

            echo "</tr>";
        }
        echo "</table>";
        odbc_close($Conn);

Answer 1

If you want to send large blocks of data to the database then enclose everything in a form with the method=POST name/attribute

 <form action="updatingScript.php" name="myForm" method="POST" >

     <textarea name="textArea" rows="5" cols="40"><?=$review ?></textarea>

</form>

Then in your updatingScript.php do this

 if(isset($_POST['myForm'])) {

    $textInfo = mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['textArea']);

    //move this info in your database
    mysql_connect("localhost", "root", "");
    mysql_select_db("myDb")  

    $query="UPDATE myTable SET userTextInfo='$textInfo' WHERE userId='$userId' "; 
    $result=mysql_query($query);

}

Also set error_reporting(E_ALL); at the beginning of your PHP script as this will display what went wrong (in response to your “we aren’t getting any errors”)