Quite a few Booleans…

[Dodge]

Hey guys, I’m new to PHP/MySQL and I was hoping you’d be able to give me some guidance on a particular matter.

I’m designing a registration form for my website in which I want users to be able to select from a list of US states which they are available to work in. This could be more than one. Whenever I have encountered this before I have simply used checkboxes and recorded, along with the user_id, which items the user selected as Booleans in a `states` equivalent table. Obviously it wouldn’t be appropriate, nor I imagine efficient to check for each boolean per State.

Is there another way I could do this?

One last thing… what is the best way to handle “required” fields? At the moment I have been doing something like:

//Check if user has entered an email
if(!$_POST['email']) {
die('Error: Email field was blank');
}

for each field. Is there a way to combine all the checks in every field, and still have the error report the exact field that was left empty?

Thanks for all your help,

[fenway]

Well, in theory, you could bitmask the states, since it's a fixed number, but I'm not sure if I even like that suggestion.  As far as the required fields, you'll have to "check" each one, though you could define them in advance and just iterate through them.