Function to validate $_POST array - Return another array - not quite there yet

[Phear46]

function validate() {
//Returns 'false' with no errors
//Returns 'true' with errors

	$ERROR_Validate = false;
	$ERROR_Specify = array();

	foreach($_POST as $a) {
		if ($a == "") {
			$ERROR_Validate = true;
			array_push($ERROR_Specify, "$a is empty!";
		}
	}
		
	if($ERROR_Validate == false) {
		return false;
	} else {
		return array($ERROR_Specify);
	}
}

OK all i want to do here is test for empty form inputs. its working fine. Then I wanted to make it report which inputs were missing and i cant quite figure out how. Above is what i had but I realise "array_push($ERROR_Specify, "$a is empty!";" is wrong. this will add > "is empty" < to the array.

 

I need to figure out how to get the correct key from the $_POST array when the element is empty. Also, running this script results in a error and im not sure why. commenting out the array_push line fixes it. I dont understand why.

 

Thanks for reading!

Im still learning php so youll have to forgive me for some silly mistakes!

[PaperTiger]

If you want to get the array key in your foreach, you can do:

foreach($_POST as $key => $value)

A few other notes:

 

- Rather than just checking if the value = "", you may want to trim it first. As if someone enters a blank space I would assume you'd want that to return an error about being empty, but it wouldn't because " " != "". There is also a function in php called empty() which checks if a variable is "empty", though depending on the variable type it can produce unexpected results sometimes.

 

- Where you're doing "return array($ERROR_Specify);", you have already said that $ERROR_Specify is an array, so you don't need to then put that array into another array unless you have some other reason for doing so.

[Phear46]

Thankyou PaperTiger, that worked perfectly! didnt know you could do that in a foreach! And yeah,

 return array($ERROR_Specify)

was giving me a weird output.

 

Ill have a look at empty(), ive played about with it but it can, like you say, throw weird results. I think im going to try and write my own function for testing inputs at somepoint, I want to make sure the strings arent to long or short and dont contain anything but (a-z 0-9) etc. ill get round to that later, this works for now!

 

Thankyou!