Question

I have the following form:

HTML

<form id="myForm" action="" method="post">
<div id="edit-box">
<INPUT type="submit" name="save-text" id="save-text" value="Save">
<textarea id="editor" name="editor">
<?php echo $content; ?>
</textarea>
</div>
</form>

PHP

if ($_POST["save-text"]){
    // get form data and do stuff here
}

How can I make sure that the PHP script is run only when the submit button is clicked and no other time?

Answer 1

The problem is that if($_POST["save-text"]) returns false and so your code isn’t being executed. You will need to wrap the $_POST["save-text"] with the isset() function. isset() can be used to check the existence of a certain variable and returns TRUE if a variable exists and has a value other than NULL or FALSE.

The correct code would look like this:

if (isset($_POST['save-text'])) {
    //Do something
}

You should also make sure your submit buttons have a ‘value’ attribute. If they don’t, there wont be a value in the $_POST array and so isset($_POST[“submit”]) would return false.

Example:

<input type="submit" name="submit">

isset($_POST["submit"])   // returns false

<input type="submit" name="submit" value="submit">

isset($_POST["submit"])   // returns true.