Question

I’m using $.ajax to send the values of a form to a PHP script.

The form input fields are read like arrays by PHP, but I don’t know how to do the same with javascript and jQuery, and send them in such a way that PHP is able to read them like arrays.

For example a input named foo[bar] in PHP you get it as $_POST['foo']['bar']

Currently I’m sending this data like

data:{
   foo_bar: $('form').find('#foo_bar').val(),
   foo_xxx: $('form').find('#foo_xx').val()
},

and manually assembling the array in the PHP script.

But it’s starting to take a lot of lines of code.
Could I somehow automate this, and send all the form input as an multidimensional array to PHP?

Answer 1

You could use $.serialize();

data: {
  d: $('form').serialize()
}

Check for more information here: http://api.jquery.com/serialize/

It will send back a string field=value&field2=value& and you could use parse_str to handle it

parse_str sample:

$foo = "t[]=1&t[]=2&b=3";
parse_str($foo, $bar);
var_dump($bar);

Results to:

array(2) {
  ["t"]=>
  array(2) {
    [0]=>
    string(1) "1"
    [1]=>
    string(1) "2"
  }
  ["b"]=>
  string(1) "3"
}