Question

thank you all so very much for helping. It’s seemingly such an easy task, and I feel I just hit a brick wall and not knowing how to fix it.

I’ll try to explain what I am doing a bit more and hope it makes sense.

I used a database to populate my dropdown box, dropdown box is something like:

echo "<form action='process_form.php' method='post'>";
echo "Select an item<br />";
echo "<select name='item' id='item'>";
//database was connected and select query was executed succesfully. $result was the select query result.
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
//each row contains more than one words, something like "dressmaker mannequin size 12"
echo "<option value=" . $row['style'] . ">" . $row['style']. "</option>" . "<br />";
}
...
...

Dropdown box was populated with correct data.

Then user selects an item from this drop down box, and clicks the submit button.

I need to know which item user has selected in order to calculate its shipping costs, but when I use $_POST['item'] to try to find out which item was selected, I get the first word “dressmaker”, the rests were missing!

Please help me to obtain the whole string of words.

Many many thanks in advance.

Sorry I am completely new to forums, and I don’t even know how to post or follow up with a question. If you guys can help me on this as well. At the moment, I am struggling to post my follow up questions … hope this will show up …

Answer 1

Hopefully, your MYSQL database has a primary key? If it does, set the value of each <option> to the primary key of the item.

For example:

SQL

id  desc
1   "dressmaker thing with mannequin"
2   "dressmaker thing no mannequin"

Form PHP

echo "<option value='".$query['id']."'>".$query['desc']."</option>";

When form is submitted, re-query the database for the desired description. You’ll be doing this re-query anyway to retrieve prices and such, yes?

The reason this is happening is that spaces are discouraged in HTML attributes. You shouldn’t have an attribute like value='this attribute is spaced'.