SECOND SIGHTING » PHP

Sending HTTP Post Data Without Using a Form

Tom — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:51:50 +0000

I always forget how to do this and it’s really useful… http://www.faqts.com/knowledge_base/view.phtml/aid/12039/fid/51

Using Stored Values With Select Elements

Tom — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 17:02:18 +0000

Heres how to use regular expressions to transform a plain HTML select element into one that autoselects based on a previous choice. You could use this to retrieve a value from a database and automatically select the correct option in a dropdown menu. The select element in the example below is called occupation and it is stored in an array called $user_data.

search for:

replace with:

Make sure to rename the fields accordingly for your situation.

Simple UK Phone Number Validation

Tom — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 16:33:11 +0000

This is a simple solution which should help a lot with accidental errors, but it’s still very easy for someone to enter a fake number if they want to. The first line of code removes anything thats not a number from a submitted post variable called ‘phone’. The second line checks the number begins with a 0, followed by 1-9 (‘00′ is not allowed as it’s the UK dialling prefix for international calls), followed by 8 or 9 other digits. The example below works with PHP 5.2.0 & above.

$phone = ereg_replace('[^0-9]', '', $_POST['phone']);
if (!filter_var($phone, FILTER_VALIDATE_REGEXP, array('options' => array('regexp' => "/^0[1-9][0-9]{8,9}$/")))) {
echo 'Please enter your phone number correctly';
} 

Simple Email Validation

Tom — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 22:22:49 +0000

Starting with PHP 5.2.0 there is a really easy way to validate email addresses – namely the filter_input function. The example below takes a submitted POST variable called ‘email’, validates it against the email format, and returns FALSE if the filter fails or the value of the variable on success.

$email = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'email', FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL); 

Thats all there is to it.