Question

I need to insert all variables sent with post, they were checkboxes each representing a user.

If I use GET I get something like this:

?19=on&25=on&30=on

I need to insert the variables in the database.

How do I get all variables sent with POST? As an array or values separated with comas or something?

Answer 1

The variable $_POST is automatically populated.

To see the entire contents of this array, just type

var_dump($_POST);

You can access individual values like this:

$name = $_POST["name"];

This, of course, assumes your form is using the typical form encoding (i.e. enctype=”multipart/form-data”

If your post data is in another format (e.g. JSON or XML, you can do something like this:

$post = file_get_contents('php://input');

and $post will contain the raw data.

Assuming you’re using the standard $_POST variable, you can test if a checkbox is checked like this:

if(isset($_POST['myCheckbox']) && $_POST['myCheckbox'] == 'Yes')
{
     ...
}

If you have an array of checkboxes (e.g.

<form action="myscript.php" method="post">
  <input type="checkbox" name="myCheckbox[]" value="A" />val1<br />
  <input type="checkbox" name="myCheckbox[]" value="B" />val2<br />
  <input type="checkbox" name="myCheckbox[]" value="C" />val3<br />
  <input type="checkbox" name="myCheckbox[]" value="D" />val4<br />
  <input type="checkbox" name="myCheckbox[]" value="E" />val5
  <input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Submit" />
</form>

Using [] in the checkbox name indicates that the selected values will be accessed by PHP script as an array. In this case $_POST['myCheckbox'] won’t return a single string but will return an array consisting of all the values of the checkboxes that were checked.

For instance, if I checked all the boxes, $_POST['myCheckbox'] would be an array consisting of: {A, B, C, D, E}. Here’s an example of how to retrieve the array of values and display them:

  $myboxes = $_POST['myCheckbox'];
  if(empty($myboxes))
  {
    echo("You didn't select any boxes.");
  }
  else
  {
    $i = count($myboxes);
    echo("You selected $i box(es): <br>");
    for($j = 0; $j < $i; $j++)
    {
      echo $myboxes[$j] . "<br>";
    }
  }