i need to validate textarea of a html form using php
<textarea name="comments" cols="26" rows="3" id="comments"><?php
echo($comments);?></textarea>
You really should use htmlspecialchars before showing any user stipulated HTML to help prevent security holes. Also you can use short tags (popular...) to make the HTML more readable. Eg:
<textarea name="comments" cols="26" rows="3" id="comments">
<?=htmlspecialchars($comments)?>
</textarea>
presently my php code to validate the text area is
if($comments == "" )
You should not rely on register_globals, and use either $_GET or $_POST instead depending on which methoed to send your form details back to the server. Eg:
if($_POST['comments'] == '' ) {
...
}
with this code if a user hits the space bar once or couple of times as a
matter of fact there are no characters entered by the user i do not want
this to happen, if a user simply hits the spacebar and does not type
anything i should be able to display an alert message.
You can use the trim() function to determine whether a variable is just whitespace.
$comments = trim($_POST['comments']);
if ($comments == '') {
// Show error message
}
--
Richard Heyes
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