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Dealing with HTML forms

HTML forms are used to acquire and work with user input. As you may have noticed in the scripts we have used so far, every variable that was meant to hold user input had been given a value within that script. To get the actual user input from the web browser, we are required to use HTML forms. This is also the primary method for passing information from users to the servers. Bellow is a simple HTML form, just to give you a picture of what we are dealing with.

<html>

<head>

    <title>This is my first HTML form </title>

</head>

<body>

  <form action='doc1.php' method='POST'>

<strong>Your name </strong>

  <input type='text' name='yourname'><br />

  <strong>Your text here: </strong>

  <textarea name='yourtext' rows='4' cols='45'></textarea><br />

  <input type='submit' value='Send'/>

  </form>

</body>

</html>

This little piece of code produces a web page like this:

To properly implement the how HTML passes data from one page to the other, we will look at the two files; one being the file containing the HTML code above. We will save that file as doc1.html or you can save it as .php if you like.

 index.html

<html>

<head>

    <title>This is my first HTML form </title>

</head>

<body>

  <form action='doc1.php' method='POST'>

  <strong>Your name </strong>

  <input type='text' name='yourname'><br />

  <strong>Your text here: </strong>

  <textarea name='yourtext' rows='4' cols='45'></textarea><br />

  <input type='submit' value='Send'/>

  </form>

</body>

</html>

and the code for doc1.php will look like this:

doc1.php

<html>

<head>

    <title>This is my first HTML form </title>

</head>

<body>

  <?php

    echo "Your Name is :".$_POST[yourname]."<br />";

    echo "The text you entered is : ".$_POST[yourtext]."<br />"; 

  ?>

</body>

</html>

Analysis of code

The code in the first file, tells the browser to display two input areas one is just a text field where the user is expected to enter their name. The second input area is where the user is expected to type any text they wish to. Notice that immediately after the tag, we have the form tag, with two attributes, one is the action and another one is method. The action attribute tells the browser where to forward the data collected on this form, in this case we are sending the data to doc1.php.

The method attribute tells the browser how the data should be send. There are two methods of doing this, one is the POST and the other one is the GET method. If you used the GET method the data you are passing will be displayed in the address bar for everyone to see. The POST method hides the data from the user's eyes.

Before the closing form tag ( we have another input widget that is called the submit button. This button upon being clicked sends the data to the specified file in the action attribute. In our case upon clicking the submit/Send button, our user input will be send to doc1.php.

All that the doc1.php file does is retrieve the data in the POSTED variables and display them back to the user. Now this kind of data transfer can rarely be done without using the HTML form. In the next few postings we will explore HTML forms in detail.

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Dealing with HTML forms

Analysis of code

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