Question

I understand how a PHP URL works – I think … but I’m having problems getting the actual value of the variable to be passed in the example below.

Example

Note: I am adding the below form into a data cell (as part of a table being read via PHP).

$currentrowid = 1;

echo '<td>
  <div class="editdelete">
    <form action="phpindex.php?page=edit&thisrow=<?php echo $currentrowid;?>" method="post">
      <input type="submit" value="Edit" >
    </form>
  </div>
</td>';

… Some other section of code to read the URL output by the form above:

$val = $_POST['thisrow']; 
echo "the value is: " .$val; //Outputs "$currentrowid"

So, as you can see the code returns the actual name of the variable being passed, NOT the value of the variable being passed.

Any ideas here?

Answer 1

Since you are already within a PHP block, you should not wrap your variable within <?php ... ?>. This will give you an error.

To make this work, you can choose 1 of 2 options:

1) String Concatenation:

echo '... <form action="phpindex.php?page=edit&thisrow='.$currentrowid.'" method="post"> ...';

2) Wrap your string in " (double quotes) instead of ' (single quotes):

echo "... <form action=\"phpindex.php?page=edit&thisrow=$currentrowid\" method=\"post\"> ...";

Note that the second method forces you to escape all the double quotes inside of your string.