Question

I am building a survey, in which participants use a html form to enter details.

For example:

What gender are you?    Male | Female 

The Male/Female option can be selected using a radio button.

However, I would like to store the answer in my database as an INT value, which is 0 for male and 1 for female. How do I write a query which represents that?

I have a rough idea which looks like this, but doesn’t seem to work:

$__g = Array('male' => '0', 'female' => '1');

And also, how do I insert the value into the database? I have this, but am unsure if it works (since I can’t get the representing part correct)

$sql = "INSERT INTO `onlinesurvey` 
(gender) VALUES ('".$__g[$_POST['gender']]."');

Many thanks for your help =)

Answer 1

How do I write a query which represents that?

Why convert the string to an int? I think what you want to do here is use an enum column type to represent the range of possible values…

And also, how do I insert the value into the database?

If you use an enum, you would just insert the string literal value as the column value.

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EDITED:

Here is some information on how the enum type works:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/enum.html

So your query would look like this:

$sql = "INSERT INTO `onlinesurvey` (gender) VALUES ($_POST['gender']);

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EDITED:

I haven’t seen your HTML, but make sure the select list looks something like this:

<select name="gender">
<option value="male">Male</option>
<option value="female">Female</option>
</select>

The critical piece of this is getting the option value attributes to be equal to the enum values.