PHP Form

In this post I would create a simple form in HTML (with just two input boxes) and then write PHP code to retrieve the form values a user submit using PHP.

So in our sample project there are only two files:

1. form.html
2. form-handler.php

Let see the form.html code:

    

 

    

        First Name:  

        Last Name:  

 
        
    

This form will generate following output:

There are following points to note:

1. The action attribute value is form-handler.php. It shows, when the form is submitted form-handler.php would process the form. Processing includes, retrieving form data and storing it somewhere if you want to.
2. The input text boxes names are first-name and last-name. On PHP page, we would use these  names to retrieve the values user entered in the PHP form.

The Server Side

The form-handler.php code retrieves the both input values and display on the next page. Lets first look at the form-handler.php code.

$first_name = $_REQUEST['first-name'];
$last_name = $_REQUEST['last-name']; ?>
echo "


    

 

    First Name : $first_name 
    Last Name: $last_name 


";

Please note following points regarding we process the form values at server side:

1. The PHP receives the submitted values and put them into global associatve array $_REQUEST. We can retrieve values using the input text field names.
2. In the code above, we have retrieved the values from $_REQUEST array, store them into our local variable and then printed those values inside the HTML BODY element.

When we submit the form, following output is displayed: