Re: textarea posting duplicate text

Elizabeth Lawrence wrote: > Hello. I have been asked to look at a PHP issue for someone, and I can't > figure out what the problem is. I'm hoping one of you experts can help! > > They are using Red Hat Linux / Ensim Pro 4.0.2, PHP 4.3.10, and Apache > 2.0. > > The problem: When a lot of text is entered into a textarea on a form, the > text that shows up in the $_POST['textarea'] variable has the text that > was > entered, but it is duplicated. Have you verified that the POST data itself is doubled?... This sounds REALLY weird to me... > This is causing problems for their forums. > Here is a very simple script I placed on the server: > www.tidefans.com/textarea_test.php (code below) > > When I place the same script on another server I have access to, the > textarea text is "posted" fine. > > Is this a PHP setting somewhere that I'm missing? There's certainly on "double long POST data" setting :-) It could be a bug in PHP or Apache -- Search their bug databases. http://bugs.php.net/ for PHP. http://apache.org/ should lead you to it for Apache. You're on your own for Ensim Pro, whatever that is. I would also recommend that you start LOGGING the text inputs that are giving problems as they come in. EG: <?php $input = $_POST['input']; $len = strlen($input); if ($len > 10 && substr($input, 0, $len/2) == substr($input, $len/2)){ error_log("Double Input: $input"); } ?> This may lead you to finding some commonality in the input text other than length that is not immediately apparent right now. Actually, I guess you *COULD* just use the code above or similar to automatically strip out the doubled text -- But document/comment the hell out of that unless you want to confuse every developer that ever looks at it!!! -- Like Music? http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm