Question

I’m not exactly sure how the logic would work on this. My brain is fried and i cant think clearly.

I am handling some POST data, and one of the fields in this array is a quantity string. I can read this string and determine if there are more than 1 widgets that need handled.

if($quantity <= 1){ //$_POST[widget1] }

Now say there are 4 widgets. The quantity field would reflect this number, but how would i loop through them and assign them to a new array themselves?

$_POST[widget1], $_POST[widget2], $_POST[widget3], $_POST[widget4]

How do i take that quantity number, and use it to grab that many and those specific named items from the post array, using some kind of wild card or prefix or something? I dont know if this is a for, or while, or what kind of operation. How do I loop through $_POST[‘widget*X*’], where X is my quantity number?

The end result is im looking to have an array structured like this:

$widgets[data1]
$widgets[data2]
$widgets[data3]
$widgets[data4]

Answer 1

Using a for loop, you can access the $_POST keys with a variable, as in $_POST["widget$i"]

$widgets = array();
for ($i=1; $i<=$quantity; $i++) {
  // Append onto an array
  $widgets[] = $_POST["widget$i"];
}

However, a better long-term solution would be to change the HTML form such that it passes an array back to PHP in the first place by adding [] to the form input’s name attribute:

<input type='text' name='widgets[]' id='widget1' value='widget1' />
<input type='text' name='widgets[]' id='widget2' value='widget2' />
<input type='text' name='widgets[]' id='widget3' value='widget3' />

Accessed in PHP via $_POST['widgets'], already an array!

var_dump($_POST['widgets']);