Passing values back to form

Im new to PHP coming from a background in perl devlopement. I have a form that a user can fill out. On submit the values are iterated over a foreach to check for empty(). If the an emtyp $key is found then it passes an error string to my error function. I have 2 php files, one that is the Form called profile.php and one that processes the values from the form, called profileprocess.php. There are multiple functions in profileprocess.php. When the header function is called in the profileprocess.php it takes you back to the profile.php with empty values in the fields. I was wandering if their is a way, (which Im sure their is) to pass back all the data that was correctly entered back to the form, and then a nice little message that displays the error of the data that needs to be checked by the user. I could do this a number of ways, but the key is not writing code that you dont have to. Its just smarter programming. Any ideas, or functions I could read on in the rtFM manual is greatly appreciated. I appreciate you looking at this problem... Thanks in advance, Daniel