Form Handling

You should have already learnt how to write an HTML form before. As a revision, let's take a look at the following HTML form:

<html>

<head>

</head>

<body>

User Name: <input type="text" name="user" /><br>

Password: <input type="password" name="pwd" /><br>

</form>

</body>

</html>

In the form, there are 2 fields, "User Name" and "Password".
When the user clicks the "Login" button, the form data will be sent to the page as specified by the "action" attribute. In this example, we send the data to ch03_01_login.php.

In this lesson, you will learn how to process the form data using PHP scripts.

Getting the Form Data

How to get the form data depends on the method used in submitting the HTML form:

For forms that are submitted via "GET" method, we can obtain the form via the $_GET array variable.
For forms that are submitted via "POST" method, we can obtain the form via the $_POST array variable.

For example, to get the submitted user name and password of the sample form, the following PHP code can be used:

$userName = $_GET['user'];

$password = $_GET['pwd'];

Note that the names of HTML form fields are used as the key for the corresponding elements in the array.

If you do not care about the method used in submitting the form data, you can also use the $_REQUEST array variable. The $_REQUEST variable is an associative array that contains the contents of $_GET, $_POST and $_COOKIE. (We will discuss cookies in later lesson.)

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