If you have a form containing text inputs with duplicate name attributes, and the form is posted, will you still be able to obtain the values of all fields from the $_POST array in PHP?
If you have a form containing text inputs with duplicate name attributes, and the form is posted, will you still be able to obtain the values of all fields from the $_POST array in PHP?
No. Only the last input element will be available.
If you want multiple inputs with the same name use name="foo[]" for the input name attribute. $_POST will then contain an array for foo with all values from the input elements.
<form method="post">
<input name="a[]" value="foo"/>
<input name="a[]" value="bar"/>
<input name="a[]" value="baz"/>
<input type="submit" />
</form>
See the HTML reference at Sitepoint.
The reason why $_POST will only contain the last value if you don't use [] is because PHP will basically just explode and foreach over the raw query string to populate $_POST. When it encounters a name/value pair that already exists, it will overwrite the previous one.
However, you can still access the raw query string like this:
$rawQueryString = file_get_contents('php://input'))
Assuming you have a form like this:
<form method="post">
<input type="hidden" name="a" value="foo"/>
<input type="hidden" name="a" value="bar"/>
<input type="hidden" name="a" value="baz"/>
<input type="submit" />
</form>
the $rawQueryString will then contain a=foo&a=bar&a=baz.
You can then use your own logic to parse this into an array. A naive approach would be
$post = array();
foreach (explode('&', file_get_contents('php://input')) as $keyValuePair) {
list($key, $value) = explode('=', $keyValuePair);
$post[$key][] = $value;
}
which would then give you an array of arrays for each name in the query string.
You have to create an array of them:
with name=inputname[]
and get with post,request or get
$inputs = $_POST['inputname'];
print_r($inputs);
Only if the name are array-typed names[] in that case you will be getting an array as the variable in the $_POST variable.