Question

I am processing a form that will receive lots of elements through $_POST. A certain number of these (too large a number to write out manually) follows a pattern:

$_POST['city_1']
$_POST['city_2']
$_POST['city_3']
$_POST['city_4']

etc.

The way the form is set up, I’m not sure how many elements like this are going to be sent over — it could be one, it could be 50. How can I process just a few of the $_POST elements based on their names?

Answer 1

You should create a multidimensional array instead.

Your HTML form fields could look like this:

<input type="text" name="cities[city_1]">
<input type="text" name="cities[city_2]">
<input type="text" name="cities[city_3]">
<input type="text" name="cities[city_4]">

In your PHP code you can then loop through your cities by accessing $_POST['cities']:

foreach($_POST['cities'] as $city)
{
  echo $city;
}