Bug #13718 Updated: form elements with same name problem

ID: 13718 User updated by: jone1941@yahoo.com Reported By: jone1941@yahoo.com Status: Bogus Bug Type: Feature/Change Request Operating System: All PHP Version: 4.0.6 New Comment: Oh, I'm sorry, I missunderstood you. I understand what you are getting at, ambiguity can be a problem. I guess I'll just deal with using the suggestion of indexing on a string in javascript. Thank you for all your help. Previous Comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2001-10-18 11:33:49] hholzgra@php.net no, i didn't ;) i just tried to describe what would happen *if* we would follow your suggestion and that it is a not so good idea after all (although we definetly should have a look at the [] syntax regarding standard conformance) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2001-10-18 10:57:57] jone1941@yahoo.com wow, I just noticed that you are suggesting that php actually generate an array! I posted two example html files, that clearly show that you are wrong. PHP always treats them as a single variable, no matter how many are actually set. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2001-10-18 10:54:37] jone1941@yahoo.com sorry, I refreshed the page, and it reposted. Thank you for your help, I hope that you will consider my suggestion for future releases. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2001-10-18 10:53:44] jone1941@yahoo.com I do understand that if you were in the middle of a php script, this would be a simple reassigning of the variable. However, this is a preprocessor command, and thus should be handled a little differently. Adding a "[]" at the tail of a variable and having it come out as an array on the other end seems a like a trick. It has its uses I'll give you that, but if you look at my suggestion you will realize that it would be a nice feature. You guys seem to have take the time to make sure that elements with "[]" get properly shoved into arrays, so why not this. This is a fairly common situation in html forms. Especially if you are dynamically generating them. What this really comes down to is, are you willing to overlook the fact that something like this does sort of already exist, in favor of another form of functionality? There is one other issue. If you use the variable names that you suggest, it breaks javascript. ie: <html> <body> <form name="form1" action="" method="post"> Baseball: <input type="checkbox" name="interest[]" value="baseball"> <br> Teams: <input type="text" name="teams[]" size="30" onFocus="form1.interest[0].checked=1"> <br> <input type="submit" value="submit"> </form> </body> </html> will cause an error, because you don't define arrays in javascript this way. I realize that this seems like a bug in javascript, but actually it isn't. The html 4.01 specification clearly states that: "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 (".")." Note: this does not suggest that you can add "[" or "]". So, in essence you are violating the html specification. If you still do not agree that this would only improve php, I will stop bothering you. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [2001-10-18 10:46:31] hholzgra@php.net the simple problem with auto-generating arrays is: form fields without input do not generate output so if you have a form like <form> <input type="text" name="foo"> <input type="text" name="foo"> <input type="submit"> </form> you will get an array $foo[] with two elements in PHP if both input fields are used but a plain string variable if only one (either the first or the second) is used for the javascript naming problem form.elements['foo[]'] should work find ------------------------------------------------------------------------ The remainder of the comments for this report are too long. To view the rest of the comments, please view the bug report online at http://bugs.php.net/?id=13718 Edit this bug report at http://bugs.php.net/?id=13718&edit=1