Question

I am trying to convert a client’s site from ColdFusion to PHP. I am trying to replicate one of old scripts scripts where the values of a form are inserted into a mysql db. I could not get mine to work so I tried simply echoing a value and found that it was not showing the entire value. For example I typed in 11/13/2011 in one field and Hike in another and the output was 110.

I’m not sure why its storing text as a number. Even if I change it to echo just the Hike it outputs 0. Here is my code:

HTML:

<form action="file.php" method="post">
  Event Date: <input type="text" name="eventdate" size="30" />
   Theme: <input type="text" name="theme" size="50" />
</form>

PHP:

<?php
    $eventdate = $_POST['eventdate'];
    $theme = $_POST["theme"];
    echo $eventdate+"<br />";
    echo $theme+"<br />";
?>

Answer 1

Your problem is that you are adding the fields together, not concatenating with the dot operator: .

echo $eventdate."<br />";
echo $theme."<br />";

PHP will attempt to coerce variables that are not the same type but joined in an operation into types that make sense (for instance, if you’re attempting to add a floating point number to an integer, it will evaluate the integer as a floating point number when performing the operation).

For more information, see the documentation entry for Type Juggling and how PHP Converts Strings to Numbers