note 57528 deleted from faq.html by mazzanet

Note Submitter: drane ---- This is a follow-up to Kenn White kennwhite dot nospam at hotmail dot com 's discussion on standards compliance when arrays are submitted from HTML forms. (name="myarray[1]") Reading the HTML 4 spec, http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/types.html#type-cdata --quote: 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 ("."). --end quote It would seem that you're not allowed to use [ or ] characters in 'id' OR 'name' properties. I read the the relevant parts and found nothing that made any special exceptions for form element names. In summary, PHP's way of allowing arrays to be submitted from a form appears to be standards-incompliant with HTML 4, probably XHTML 1, and likely any future standards. I really hope they come up with some other way to do it. I'm thinking semicolons or underscores... Doing something like name="myarray;1;" isn't the end of the world, and it's just weird enough that it probably won't break any existing forms. -drane