PHP:HTML / $_POST FORM

Question

I have this:

   <form action="profiles.php" method="POST" name="SearchSimple" id="SearchSimple" >
<input name="search" id="s" style="width: 150px;" type="text">
        <a style="display: inline-block; width: 100px; font-weight: bold; cursor: pointer;" id="submitSearchSimple">Search </a>
            <script>
                        $('#submitSearchSimple').click(function() {
    javascript:document.SearchSimple.submit();
        });
            </script>
</form>

It submits fine although when i do

if($_POST["submitSearchSimple"] && isset($_POST["submitSearchSimple"])) {
echo $_POST["s"] . " -TEST";
}

It doesnt show.. I get nothing

Answer 1

Your form input's name is "search" not "submitSearchSimple".

The id is not passed to the server and neither is anything that isn't a form control (like the anchor in your example).

Answer 2

In PHP, POST variables work only for INPUT elements, SELECT elements & that too in a FORM, only when the form is submitted. Also you need to specify the "name" attribute of those elements to be catched / used by the POST superglobal array variable.

In your case, you can simply do this:-
if(isset($_POST["search"]) && !empty($_POST["search"])) {
    echo $_POST["search"] . " -TEST";
}

Always remember that there is one major difference in PHP with JavaScript / jQuery. In JavaScript / jQuery, you can use either the "id" attribute or the "name" attribute to validate / manipulate the fields. But in PHP, it is always the "name" attribute of the field that is important, so be careful in doing those.

Hope it helps.

Answer 3

A simple way to identify what variable you passed as POST : you could have done a *var_dump($_POST)* in your profiles.php. You would have seen

array(1) { ["search"]=> string(4) "test" }

Therefore, you could have seen that it wasn't $_POST["s"] but $_POST["search"] and concluded that it wasn't the id that gives the name of the index but the name.

I don't see the point of using javascript in this case... (well, i can imagine it's for css styling, but you can easily style a submit button anyway.