Question

I’m probably being stupid, because its Friday afternoon, but I just can’t work this out.

What I want is to have a form where users can add infinite “records”. To do this they click an “add record” button. This runs javascript which adds a new row (tr) to a table within the <form>.

This new row has three input fields.

What I want is for this to be sent to the post variable in a format such as (but not exact if it can’t be done, but there’s a better way):

$_POST['record'] = array(
    array(
        "input1" => "value",
        "input2" => "value",
        "input3" => "value"
    ),
    array(
        "input1" => "value",
        "input2" => "value",
        "input3" => "value"
    ),
    array(
        "input1" => "value",
        "input2" => "value",
        "input3" => "value"
    ),
);

I know you can get arrays by using the name like so:

<input type="text" name="record[]" />

But this is only 1 input element. Is there any way to get a structure like above with 3 elements?

Thank you.

Answer 1

You can’t easily get what you’re looking for exactly, but you can use name="record[input1][]" (and input2 etc.) and the result is:

$_POST['record'] = array(
    "input1"=>array(
        "value", "value", "value"
    ),
    "input2"=>array(
        "value", "value", "value"
    ),
    "input3"=>array(
        "value", "value", "value"
    )
);

You could then transform it into your desired format like so:

$out = Array();
foreach(array_keys($_POST['record']['input1']) as $i) {
    foreach($_POST['record'] as $k=>$v) {
        $out[$i][$k] = $v[$i];
    }
}