Question

I’m building a restaurant menu application in PHP & JavaScript
And I can’t seem to get the buttons to append the text area when the ordering is being placed…(This is just test code at present) Here’s my code:

$test = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM main_stock");
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($test)){
echo "<div id='".$row["RCode"]."'><a href='javascript:addTo(".$row["Name"].",".$row["RCode"].")'>".$row["Name"]."</a></div>";}

And my javascript function is as follows:

function addTo(name, Rcode) {
document.getElementById('order').value += name;
}

And HTML Form is as follows:

    <form id="OrderForm" name="OrderForm" method="post" action="">
  <p>
    <label>
      <textarea name="order" id="order" cols="35" rows="20" readonly="readonly">test</textarea>
    </label>
  </p><table>
  <tr><td>Subtotal:</td><td><input type="text" id="subtotal" readonly="readonly" value="2.00" /></td></tr>
    <tr><td>Tax:</td><td><input type="text" id="tax" readonly="readonly" value="2.00"/></td></tr>
    <tr><td>Total:</td><td><input type="text" id="total" readonly="readonly" value="4.00"/></td></tr>
    <tr><td></td><td><input type="submit" id="submit" value="Send Order To Kitchen"/></td></tr>
    </table>

Answer 1

Looks like the echo may be resulting in invalid JavaScript syntax. E.g.:

addTo(Something, Inc.,STI)

Rather than:

addTo("Something, Inc.","STI")

You’ll need to output additional quotes for JavaScript to use. And, since you’re already using " for the PHP string and ' for HTML attributes, this will require escaping — or encoding:

echo "... href='javascript:addTo("".$row["Name"]."","".$row["RCode"]."")'>...";

Another option may be to use json_encode since JSON is based from JavaScript syntax:

echo "... href='javascript:addTo(".json_encode($row["Name"]).",".json_encode($row["RCode"]).")'>...";