Question

I’ve found myself with the following problem: I have form with a random number of fields. (This is so users can enter their fellow team members’s names — and there’s no set size for teams.) I need this inputted data to be formatted in preparation for being stored in a database.

The database structure is fine, it’s just getting a random number of $_POSTs and putting them into an array that’s the issue.

So far I’ve got some javascript that allows the user to create/remove an infinite number of fields, with incrementing ids/names (e.g. TeamMemberName1, TeamMemberEmail1, TeamMemberName2, TeamMemberEmail2, etc.).

Right now I’ve created an ugly series of PHP statements that puts a reasonable amount of POSTed data into a multidimenional array — I don’t see why a team should ever be bigger than 50 — and then I was going to process the array to remove any blank rows before passing it onto the database.

Example:

    $submittedTeamMembers = 
      array ( "teamMember1" => 
          array ( "name" => $_POST["teamMemberName1"],
                  "email" => $_POST["teamMemberEmail1"])
             );

But I’m guessing there’s a better way!

Answer 1

Your input names can be in array form, which PHP will understand perfectly. Example:

<input type="text" name="teamMembers[0]['name']" />
<input type="text" name="teamMembers[0]['email']" />

which PHP will interpret after post as you’d expect:

//print_r($_POST['teamMembers']);
Array
(
    [0] => Array
        (
            [name] => foo
            [email] => bar
        )

)