Question

I’ve got a form that contains contact info. Each has a type, and then the contact information itself. For example:

Type    | Contact
-------------------------------
cell    | 555-555-5555
home    | 444-444-4444
email   | [e-mail]

It’s a functional requirement that users can add/remove contacts from the form using jQuery (showing only the contact info that exists – i.e. it’s not a static contact form).

Since users can add/remove any row they like in the form, this produces HTTP parameters similar to the following (with numbers that are not sequential, and may not be contiguous):

contact_ty3=cell
contact3=555-555-5555

contact_ty994=home
contact994=444-444-4444

contact_ty45=email
contact45=[e-mail]

Therefore, numbers after the contact and contact_ty parameters are arbitrary, except that they serve the purpose to match up the type to the associated contact information.

So, on the receiving end, in PHP, how to I efficiently process the parameters, using the numbers to match up the types and contacts? I’m thinking the best way to do this would be via regex, but the simplest function I can think of iterates through the entire $_REQUEST array, strips out the parameters that start with contact, and go from there.

Is there a more efficient way? Seems like I’m writing a manual string/param parsing method, when perhaps there’s a function to do this that I simply don’t know about. Since I won’t know the precise names of the form parameters beforehand, I can’t rely on the assumption that there will be a contact1, contact2, etc.

Answer 1

With some clever naming you can easily match them up on post:

<select name="contact[3][type]">...</select>
<input  name="contact[3][value]" ..>
<select name="contact[994][type]">...</select>
<input  name="contact[994][value]" ..>
<select name="contact[45][type]">...</select>
<input  name="contact[45][value]" ..>

And in PHP

<?php
    foreach($_POST['contact'] as $id => $data){
        echo "$id => type is {$data['type']}, value is {$data['value']}";
    }