Question

I’ve been working on trying to write a function that will grab the POST values of any given form submission, pop them into an array, loop through the array using trim, addslashes etcetera pass that value back to a variable where it can then be passed to a database.

Now the hurdle I have atm is getting all the input,textarea,select element data into an array upon form submission. code I have follows

$fields = array($_POST['1'], $_POST['2']);

    $i = 0;
    foreach ($fields as $field) {
        $i++;
        ${'field'.$i } = trim(addslashes(strip_tags($field)));
        echo "POST field info #". $i ."&nbsp;-&nbsp;". ${'field'.$i }."<br />";
    }

As you can see everything is fine here baring that the POST value names are still being in-putted statically, what I need is a way to get that POST data fed into a loop which dynamically calls the POST name using an increment variable and then pop all that data into the same array. Code I have tried follows.

for ($ii=0;$ii++;) {
    foreach($_POST['$ii'] as $field) {
        $fields = array($field);
    }
}

    $i = 0;
    foreach ($fields as $field) {
        $i++;
        ${'field'.$i } = trim(addslashes(strip_tags($field)));
        echo "POST field info #". $i ."&nbsp;-&nbsp;". ${'field'.$i }."<br />";
    }

Now I know this wont work but I can sense I am relatively close, so I am wondering if any clever person can help me sort the last part out? I sadly am now going to sleep and wont be viewing this post for at least 9 hours, apologies.

Thanks in advance.

Dan.

Answer 1

You need to assign values to $_POST[1] and $_POST[2] to begin with, I’ve done this for you but normally they would be populated from a form I assume?

I’m not sure why you want to do this sort of thing: ${‘field’.$key}, but I’ve left that part as is as I assume you must have a reason.

Anyway I’ve modified your code a bit, see below.

$_POST['1'] = '<h1>variable 1</h1>';
$_POST['2'] = '<h2>variable 2</h2>';

foreach($_POST as $key => $value){
    ${'field'.$key} = trim(addslashes(strip_tags($value)));
    echo "POST field info #". $key ." = ". ${'field'.$key}."<br />";
}

The above code outputs:
POST field info #1 = variable 1
POST field info #2 = variable 2

On a side note, using field names such as ‘1’ and ‘2’ is not very good. Try using something more descriptive but as I said above I assume you have a reason for doing this.

---

UPDATE:
You can still get this to work for any form even if you are using specific names for the form elements. I have added a few lines below as an example for you.

$_POST['email'] = '[e-mail]';
$_POST['password'] = 'hgbks78db';
$_POST['name'] = '';

foreach($_POST as $key => $value){
    if($value==''){
        echo 'POST field "'.$key . '" is empty<br />';
        /* I added the name of the field that is empty to an error array 
        so you have a way of storing all blank fields */
        $a_error[] = $key;
    }
    else{
        echo 'POST field "'.$key . '" is not empty<br />';
    }
}