Question

I have a PHP form, which in the end is going to write all the filled in data to a MySQL database. That’s all fairly doable, but here is something tricky that I don’t know how to handle:

I have a DIV which requests all the rows of one table. Every row represents a category and the user can choose several categories to add to their post. This is the code I use to retrieve the rows + checkbox in front of them:

<?php

$sql = "SELECT merknaam FROM merken";
$result = mysql_query($sql);

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
    echo "&nbsp;&nbsp;<input type=\"checkbox\" name=\"merken\" value='" . $row['merknaam'] . "'>&nbsp;" . $row['merknaam'] . " <Br />  ";
}

?>

The user can choose multiple categories, and I would like to save them all and write them to my database. All the categories should be written to ‘one’ column called ‘categories’, but the seperate categories should still be distinguishable.

Might be a tricky one? Hope someone can help!

Answer 1

Change the code for the checkboxes to:

echo "&nbsp;&nbsp;<input type=\"checkbox\" name=\"merken[]\" value='" . $row['merknaam'] . "'>&nbsp;" . $row['merknaam'] . " <br />  ";

Adding the [] after the name will allow PHP to treat the checkboxes as an array, which you can serialize and store in your database.