Question

I am experiencing some issues with a form I am making. I have the code to post a form to my PHP script that is meant to handle the data with this code:

<script type="text/javascript">
 $(document).ready(function()
 {
  $("#submit").click(function() 
  {
   var q1 = $("#q1").val();
   var q2 = $("#q2").val();
   var answers = "page=1&q1="+q1+"&q2="+q2;

   $.ajax({
    type:'POST',
    url:'add.php',
    data:answers,
    success:function(response)
    {
     $("#answers").html(response);
    }
   });
  });       
 });
</script>

This form is then received in my PHP script like this:

$page = $_POST['page'];
$q1 = $_POST['q1'];
$q2 = $_POST['q2'];
echo "Page: " .$page . "<br/>Question 1: " . $q1 . "<br/>Question 2: " . $q2;

The issue of it all is that I want this form to be able to handle X amount of inputs and also handle input I do not know the name of. Like I can get 5 textboxes, or 2 textboxes + a string of radiobuttons and so on. Is there a way to collect ALL $_POST data and then explode it or something similar so I can get it ready for the database? I wish to recover all question id’s(values) and all answer values(could be a string or an int representing a radiobutton id).

Answer 1

First: Let jQuery build your data string, your current method requires you to know each field in advance and can’t handle data with special characters in it.

url:'add.php',
data: $('#myForm').serialize(),
success:function(response)

Second: Name your fields using the PHP multiple fields with the same name convention:

<input type="radio" name="answer[1]" value="foo">
<input type="radio" name="answer[1]" value="bar">

You can then access them as:

$_POST['answer'][]

It is an array, so you can get the ‘1’ and the ‘foo’ or the ‘bar’ in a loop.