Question

i’m unsure how to phrase my question. but I’ve got an html form submitting data to a java backend which handles the data and submits it to the database.

the java form grabs each of my values using the javax.servlet.http.HttpServletRequest library

so in order to grab the value of:

<input type="text" name="firstName">

In the java page I would do:

String firstName = request.getParameter("firstName");

this works great, however if my input is two words, it will only return the first one.

so say i put in “John George” for my firstName,
the java page will only receive “John”.

I can’t figure out why.

Form Code:

   foot =  "<form method='POST' action='Submit'>";
    //path to java servlet 
    foot += "<input type='hidden' name='firstName' value="+firstName+">"; 
    foot += "<input type='hidden' name='lastName' value="+lastName+">"; 
    foot += "<input type='hidden' name='school' value="+school+">"; 
    foot += "<input type='hidden' name='email' value="+email+">"; 

Answer 1

Each attribute value should be wrapped with quotes. Your attributes are wrapped in quotes (which most browsers can deal with) but your value attributes don’t have any quote wrapping. So your output is looking something like this:

<input type='hidden' name='firstName' value=John George>

Because the value is not wrapped in quotes therefore the browser is interpreting “John” to be the value of the value attribute and “George” to be a new attribute without a value.

Wrapping your value attribute in quotes should fix this.

foot =  "<form method=\"POST\" action=\"Submit">";
//path to java servlet 
foot += "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"firstName\" value=\""+firstName+"\">"; 
foot += "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"lastName\" value=\""+lastName+"\">"; 
foot += "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"school\" value=\""+school+"\">"; 
foot += "<input type=\"hidden\" name=\"email\" value=\""+email+"\">";