Question

I have a selection of post fields which are submitted through a web form:

$_POST['first_name'];
$_POST['last_name'];
$_POST['house_number'];
$_POST['postcode'];

etc

I would like to add the following code structure to each one:

if (isset($_POST['first_name'])) {
    $first_name = mysql_prep($_POST['first_name']);
}

How can I use a loop to achieve this to save having to repeat myself multiple times?

Thanks

Answer 1

You can use PHP’s extract() function to do this for you.

extract($_POST);
// you now have a variable for every key in $_POST

If you only want a certain list of keys, and not the full array, you can also use variable-variables (a variable with two leading $, such as $$var):

$keysToExtract = array('first_name', 'last_name');
foreach ($keysToExtract as $key) {
    $$key = $_POST[$key];
}
// you now have $first_name and $last_name