Spot the stupidity in this simple code!

[delphi123]

Hi,

 

I'm creating an incredibly simple script to insert values into a database as a test to get used to php, however I'm baffled as to why the following script doesn't work - it all seems fine and I get no errors, except the title, description and link text are inserted blank into the database.

 

On submit new table rows are created, just nothing comes through!

 

Any ideas?

news.php

<?php

$username = "root";
$password = "";
$hostname = "localhost"; 

//connection to the database
$dbhandle = mysql_connect($hostname, $username, $password)
  or die("Unable to connect to MySQL");


//select a database to work with
$selected = mysql_select_db("newsmanagement",$dbhandle)
  or die("Could not select database");

//execute the SQL query and return records
$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM articles");
//fetch tha data from the database
echo "<ul>";
while (
$row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) { 
   echo "<li><a href='article.php?id=".$row{'newsid'}."'>".$row{'title'}."</a></li>";
}
echo "</ul>";
//close the connection
mysql_close($dbhandle);
?>
<form action="news_insert.php" method="post" enctype="text/plain">
<table>
<tr>
<td>News Title: </td><td><input type="text" name="title"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>News Description: </td><td><input type="text" name="description"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>News Link: </td><td><input type="text" name="link"></td>
</tr>
</table>
<input type="submit" value="Submit news">
</form>

 

news_insert.php

<?php
$username = "root";
$password = "";
$hostname = "localhost"; 

//connection to the database
$con = mysql_connect($hostname, $username, $password)
  or die("Unable to connect to MySQL");

mysql_select_db("newsmanagement", $con);

$sql="INSERT INTO articles 
(
title, 
description, 
link
) 
VALUES (
'$_POST[title]',
'$_POST[description]',
'$_POST[link]'
)";

if (!mysql_query($sql,$con))
  {
  die('Error: ' . mysql_error());
  }
echo "1 record added";

mysql_close($con)
?> 

 

[PFMaBiSmAd]

Remove the following from your form tag, it prevents the form from submitting data -

 

enctype="text/plain"

[Psycho]

Aslo, you need to modify your INSERT query. You reference the POST values with the field names NOT enclosed in quotes. This, may cause the interpreter to assume you are referencing a static variable as the index instead of the field name:

 

$sql="INSERT INTO articles 
(title, description, link) 
VALUES ('{$_POST['title']}', '{$_POST['description']}', '{$_POST['link']}')";

[delphi123]

great help folks! Thanks very much - could I ask what do the { } brackets do exactly?

 

Having come from asp it's all fairly familiar, so had tried the sql statement with quotes around the values, but it spat an error - didn't realise I needed to also curly bracket them - have seen the curly brackets being used elsewhere so would be great to have an explanation!

[PFMaBiSmAd]

See the Variable parsing section at this link - http://us2.php.net/manual/en/language.types.string.php

 

Basically, you can help the parser determine where a variable starts and ends when it is within a double-quoted string. This allows arrays to use the same syntax inside of a string that you would use outside of a string and it allows you to delimit a variable where there are characters adjacent to the variable that are part of the string but also could define a valid variable name. $var_text could mean you want $var followed by _text or that you mean a variable named $var_text. By using {$var}_text you can accomplish the first form.

[Catfish]

If you use double quotes to define strings, single quotes are taken literally inside the double quotes and don't need to be escaped. This would be why:

$sql="INSERT INTO articles 
(
title, 
description, 
link
) 
VALUES (
'$_POST['title']',
'$_POST['description']',
'$_POST['link']'
)";

 

probably didn't work. There is no such variable called $_POST[. Another option is to close the string when inserting variables like:

 

$string = "Double quoted strings are 'sometimes' ".$_POST['variable']." 'confusing'.";

 

My info is probably no entirely accurate so you should check out the PHP manual. Best manual ever I reckon.

[delphi123]

great explanations folks! Thanks very much!