Question

The function below makes an AJAX post. makepostrequest is just a standard ajax post request function I wrote that I have omitted since it’s not the source of the problem. The function below does not send ‘widgets’.

function widgets_positions(){
    var widgets = '';
    var col_1 = document.getElementById('col_1');
    var col_2 = document.getElementById('col_2');
    var col_3 = document.getElementById('col_3');
    for(i = 0; i < col_1.childNodes.length; i++) {
        var str1 = col_1.childNodes[i].className;
        if(str1 && str1.match('widget')) widgets+='&c[1]['+i+']='+col_1.childNodes[i].id;
    }

makePOSTRequest('/ajax.php',"widgets="+widgets);


    return true;
}

BUT if in place of ‘widgets’ I try to post

var random = 'sumo'
makePOSTRequest('/ajax.php',"widgets="+random);

it works.

Not only that, if I place an echo command in the above before 'makepostrequest', 'widgets' get printed out on the clinetside as c[1]c[1]blahblah.

So why does var random = 'sumo' get sent but the 'widgets' variable does not?

Answer 1

It’s because ‘widgets’ starts with an &, which will mark the beginning of another variable definition in that request. So ‘widgets’ goes empty.

Try to remove that ‘&’, and parse it accordingly in server-side to correctly read each widget.