Question

I am programming a fantasy pet game. Currently, I am working on a tool to help users manage their personal shop inventory. The tool includes options to change the sale price of each item – and that’s where my problem is. Here, let me show you:

The HTML

<form method="post">
<input type="text" name="cost[$item_id]" value="" />
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit" />
</form>

$item_id is a variable that corresponds to the item which is being edited. It must be included in the array, otherwise… I won’t know which price corresponds to what item.

Also, this script:

<input type="text" name="cost[$item_id]" value="" />

is repeated for the amount of items in the shop’s inventory. So, the form can include an unlimited amount of these entries. Hence the array.

The Script

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

foreach ($_POST['cost'] as $key => $value) {
$submitted_array = array_keys($_POST['cost']); 
echo ($_POST['cost'][$submitted_array[0]] . " " . $submitted_array[0]); 
}

}

The script above works… however, it will only print the first set of data from the array.

Now, that seems fine – BUT, remember how I said I could have an unlimited amount of cost entries? That’s my problem – when I use a variable to replace the “0” in the script above, the function stops working all together. I could repeat the function, if I knew how many entries total the array would include – but I don’t. So what can I do? Is there a simple solution to my problem?

Adding a hidden field to the form that specifies how many items are being changed is possible – I just don’t know if it would be helpful.

If you would like to see a screen caption of the form to get a better understanding of what I’m talking about, just ask and you will receive!

Answer 1

That’s because you’re rewriting the $submitted_array variable multiple times, when you only need once.

if (isset($_POST['update'])) {
    $submitted_array = array_keys($_POST['cost']);
    foreach ($_POST['cost'] as $key => $value) {
        echo ($_POST['cost'][$submitted_array[0]] . " " . $submitted_array[0]);
    }
}

Also, considering your cost array, you don’t need to use array_keys at all:

if (isset($_POST['update'])) {
    foreach ($_POST['cost'] as $item_ID => $item_cost) {
        echo ($item_ID . " " . $item_cost);
    }
}