Bug #16195 Updated: GET/POST-vars does not work according to standards

ID: 16195 Updated by: mail4news@mailme.dk Reported By: mail4news@mailme.dk -Status: Bogus +Status: Open Bug Type: Feature/Change Request Operating System: All PHP Version: 4.1.2 New Comment: Perhaps two new arrays should be included, like _GETA and _POSTA that will return an array instead of a single value? Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2002-07-14 13:07:13] rasmus@php.net Tough - this won't change ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2002-07-14 13:04:06] mail4news@mailme.dk That's not correct for id and name attributes. Those attributes are specified as CDATA, but in the CDATA description, you'll see that it spesifically imposes restraints on the id and name attributes. From the spesifications: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-cdata "For some HTML 4 attributes with CDATA attribute values, the specification imposes further constraints on the set of legal values for the attribute that may not be expressed by the DTD" Further down it says: "ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".")" Since [] aren't part of the allowed characters, we can't count on the browser to send these characters correctly. Even if most browsers (if not all), supports this, PHP forces people to break standards. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2002-07-09 11:34:57] markonen@php.net The HTML 4 and XHTML standards in fact do support the [] characters in input field names. See: http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#h-17.4 for HTML 4.01 and http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/ abstract_modules.html#s_extfor for XHTML 1.1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2002-06-08 10:50:13] bigredlinux@yahoo.com I think it has become a well adopted standard to use the [] in the names to specify an array or list. I can't think of a browser or language that does not support this. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2002-03-20 18:43:14] mail4news@mailme.dk According to (X)HTML standards you are allowed to have more than one variable with the same name in a form. One example of this is a listbox where the user can select multiple items. The common solution to this is to use "[]" after the name of the variable so that PHP treats it as an array. Ex: <select name="foo[]"> According to the standards, these characters are not allowed in the name. It is unlikely, but not probable, that you may risk incompatibillity problems with some browsers. Even though most browsers accepts it, I think PHP should follow the standards. One solution: I haven't seen the source code, so this may be more complicated to fix than I think. When parsing the data from the request there should be a check in the code that checks if it has recieved a variable with the same name. If so, it should change the original variable to an array and add the new variable in that array. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ -- Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/?id=16195&edit=1