Question

I have a form with some checkboxes in Drupal and I need to get the checked boxes to add them to a database. To get the values in the checkboxes I use var_export which returns an array indicating if the checkbox has been checked. After I have this array store in a variable I do this:

$checked = array();
if(is_array($data) {
 foreach($data as &$value) {
   if($value != 0) { //the checkbox was checked
    $checked[] = $value;
 }
}

However, when I print out the variable $checked there is nothing stored in it. What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

The normal way to do this in Drupal would be:

$checked = array_filter($form_state['values']['name_of_checkboxes_element']);

That will give you an array of all the values selected in your checkbox element, assuming you’re running this code in the submit/validate handler for the form.

Also I should mention the Devel module, it has a wonderful function called dpm() which prints the value of any variable to the messages area in a hierarchical format that you can navigate through easily.