One of the most powerful features of PHP is the way it
handles HTML forms. The basic concept that is important to
understand is that any form element in a form will
automatically be available to your PHP scripts. Please read
the manual section on Variables from outside of
PHP for more information and examples on using forms with
PHP. Here's an example HTML form:
There is nothing special about this form. It is a
straight HTML form with no special tags of any kind. When the
user fills in this form and hits the submit button, the action.php page is called. In this file
you would have something like this:
It should be obvious what this does. There is nothing
more to it. The $_POST["name"] and
$_POST["age"] variables are
automatically set for you by PHP. Earlier we used the $_SERVER autoglobal, now above we just
introduced the $_POST
autoglobal which contains all POST data. Notice how the method of our
form is POST. If we used the method GET then our form information
would live in the $_GET
autoglobal instead. You may also use the
$_REQUEST autoglobal if you don't care the source of your
request data. It contains a mix of GET, POST, COOKIE and FILE
data. See also the
import_request_variables() function.