Re: $_POST['xxx'] = "blabla" ?

Chris Shiflett wrote: >> Maybe a daft question but why would you like to check for a >> specific value? >> >> Can you give an example when this is a good thing to do? > > You might have two submit buttons, where you want to take a different > action depending upon which one the user clicks. You might also want to restrict any actions you take to specific values - one part of authenticating that the input is valid and not from, say, a spoofed form. Someone else suggested using a function to do this - and this is what I do. The function is part of a small library that I include into every page. function clean_post($key, $length=FALSE, $request=FALSE, $stripslash=FALSE, $stripmeta=FALSE) { if(array_key_exists($key,$_POST)) { $request = trim(strip_tags($_POST[$key])); if($length) { $request = substr($request,0,$length); } if($stripslash) { $request = stripslashes($request); } if($stripmeta) { strip_meta($request); } } return $request; } You call with by passing the function a string representing the key you're searching for in $_POST. If this isn't found, the function returns FALSE. eg, $passwd = clean_post('passwd'); The value pulled from $_POST is run through strip_tags (you may or may not want this. In my case, I always do because I don't accept HTML from user input).The other parameters are optional, but offer increasing levels of 'cleaning' the data = ie, restricting its length, removing slashes and stripping out meta chars. The third parameter is a way of passing a default value to the function. In this case, if the key you're searching for isn't found in $_POST, the function returns that default value rather than FALSE. -- @+ Steve