Page 280 - Beginning PHP 5.3
P. 280
Part III: Using PHP in Practice
<dt>Retyped password</dt><dd><?php echo $_POST[“password2”]?></dd>
<dt>Gender</dt><dd><?php echo $_POST[“gender”]?></dd>
<dt>Favorite widgets</dt><dd><?php echo $favoriteWidgets?></dd>
<dt>You want to receive the following newsletters:</dt><dd><?php echo
$newsletters?></dd>
<dt>Comments</dt><dd><?php echo $_POST[“comments”]?></dd>
</dl>
Generating Web Forms with PHP
So far, the forms you ’ ve created have been embedded in static HTML pages. However, because PHP
scripts can contain and output HTML, it ’ s perfectly possible to combine both the form and the form
handler in a single PHP file. Doing this gives you a couple of advantages. First, if the users haven ’ t filled
in the form correctly, you can redisplay the form to them so they can correct the errors. Second, because
the form is created from within a PHP script, you can dynamically set various parts of the form at the
time the script is run, adding a lot of power and flexibility to your forms.
As with generating any HTML markup, you can use two common approaches to generate a form within
PHP: you can use echo or print statements to write out the markup for the form, or you can separate
the PHP code from the form markup using the < ?php and ? > tags. You can also use a mixture of the two
techniques within the same script.
Try It Out Create an Interactive Form with PHP
The following all-in-one PHP script does the following things:
❑ It displays a registration form for the user to fill out. Certain fields are required to be filled in;
these are labeled with asterisks in the form. The remaining fields are optional
❑ When the form is sent, the script checks that the required fields have been filled in
❑ If all required fields are filled, the script displays a thank-you message
❑ If one or more required fields are missing, the script redisplays the form with an error message,
and highlights the fields that still need to be filled in. The script remembers which fields the user
already filled in, and prefills those fields in the new form
To try out the script, first save the following code as registration.php in your document
root folder:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN”
“http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd”>
<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” xml:lang=”en” lang=”en”>
<head>
<title>Membership Form</title>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”common.css” />
<style type=”text/css”>
.error { background: #d33; color: white; padding: 0.2em; }
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