PHP Main
Hello.
In this tutorial, I will be showing you how to use forms with PHP, and saying some erros that you might make with basic forms.
There are 2 ways in which to use forms. The first (more common), is to have 2 separate files. This tutorial will be using that method, but I will probably do a tutorial on using only one file.
Right, enough chat. Let's start coding!
Ok first, let us start with a very simple textbox form. Here is the code:
<form name="form1" method="post" action="recievefile.php">
<input type="text" name="username" />
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Done!">
</form>
Right, so let's take a closer look at this code.
The first line is the following.
<form name="form1" method="post" action="recievefile.php">
The name of the form is what you need to get data sent from this form. If you have no name, or an invalid one (contains spaces e.t.c), your form will not work correctly.
The method can be either "post" or "get". Get is very different from post, but this tutorial is based on the "post" method.
And finally, the action. The action is basically the file to go to after the user has clicked the submit button.
The second line is this:
<input type="text" name="username" />
This is quite simple. The type is the type of field, or box this is, and the name is an "ID tag", which you need to grab data from this field.
The third line is:
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Done!">
This is just the submit button.
The value is what appears on the button, and you know what the name is.
In this case, the type is "submit" which tells the web browser that this field is a submit button.
And finally, the last line is this:
</form>
This just stops the form tag.
Right, so save the following code as form.html:
<form name="form1" method="post" action="recievefile.php">
<input type="text" name="text1" />
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="Done!">
</form>
Now for recievefile.php:
<?php
$username = $_GET<'username'>;
echo ("Hello, $username. <br /> Have a nice day!");
?>
The first line is the following:
<?php
This just tells everyone that the following code is PHP.
The second line is this:
$username = $_GET<'username'>;
This sets the $username variable to the field with the name of "username";
And the last 2 lines are this:
echo ("Hello, $username. <br /> Have a nice day!");
?>
This just outputs "Hello, {--WHATEVER-YOU-TYPED-INTO-THE-TEXT-BOX-EA
RIER--}. Have a nice day!"; and then ends the PHP code.
That is pretty much the basics of forms. There are many different field types, including textareas and checkboxes, but I will not go into them now.
Thanks a lot, hope you enjoyed the tutorial.
If you have any questions feel free to contact me:
AIM: Rellizate
MSN: meltdown10@hotmail.co.uk
