Question

I have a HTML form where I will be sending all the information to the server side. One of my field is like

<option value="bus_info[{$k->bus_id},{$k->route_from},{$k->route_to}]">{$k->route_from} To {$k->route_to},{$k->bus_time}</option>

And when check in PHP side

$bus_information[] = $_REQUEST['bid'];

var_dump($bus_information);`

it shows the following result :

array
  0 => string 'bus_info[1,Guwahati,Amguri]' (length=27)

Now how can I retrieve the elements from the array ? I tried echo $bus_information[0][0]; but it shows the result b ! Why so

Answer 1

Multidimensional arrays don’t work that way in HTML and PHP. You should use this in your form:

<option value="bus_info[{$k->bus_id}][{$k->route_from}][{$k->route_to}]">{$k->route_from} To {$k->route_to},{$k->bus_time}</option>

EDIT based on comment:

Sorry, this will not work at all. I’m assuming you want the user to select some sort of route, and based on that you want to pass a particular value. The way a <select> works is this:

In your HTML use this:

<select name="test">
    <option value="1">First option</option>
    <option value="2">Second option</option>
</select>

Now, in PHP you can access the value that was submitted like this:

$_REQUEST['test'] //this value will be 1 if the user 
                  //selected the first option, or 2 if 
                  //he selected the second

You can use Arrays in the names of the input fields, so it would be possible to do something like this in HTML:

<select name="test[1]">
    <option value="1">First option</option>
    <option value="2">Second option</option>
</select>
<select name="test[2]">
    <option value="1">First option</option>
    <option value="2">Second option</option>
</select>

Note that I used the array notation on the name attribute, not the value. Now you can do this in PHP:

$_REQUEST['test'][1] //this value will be 1 if the user 
                     //selected the first option, or 2 if 
                     //he selected the second in the first
                     //drop down
$_REQUEST['test'][2] //this value will be 1 if the user 
                     //selected the first option, or 2 if 
                     //he selected the second in the second
                     //drop down

So what you’re doing, using arrays in the value attribute will not work. You could do something like this:

<select name="bus_info">
    <option value="{$k->bus_id},{$k->route_from},{$k->route_to}">{$k->route_from} To {$k->route_to},{$k->bus_time}</option>
</select>

And then in PHP:

$values = explode($_REQUEST['bus_info']);
//now $values is an array with 3 elements, the ID, the route_from and route_to