PHP code for a HTML form sending data to a MySQL database?

Question

I have this form:

<form action="contactus.php" method="post">
        <select name="formTitle">
            <option value="">Select...</option>
            <option value="M">Mr</option>
            <option value="F">Mrs</option>
        </select>

        <p><b>Name</b></p>
        <input type="text" name="formName" maxlength="50"/>

        <p><b>Enquiry</b></p>
        <input type="text" name="formEnquiry" maxlength="500"/>
    </select>

<p><input type="submit" name="formSubmit" value="Submit"/></p>

And I have a MySQL database (called 'contacts') with a table (called 'enquiries') with three columns; 'Title', 'Name', 'Enquiry'.

The database has no password or anything. It's just a localhost with a 'root' password.

What kind of PHP would I need to send the data from this HTML form to the MySQL database?

Answer 1

I can help you in this problem.

So, just add the following code to your php file contactus.php.

<?php
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "root";
$password = "";
$dbname = "contacts";

$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}

if(isset($_POST['formSubmit'])) {
    $formTitle = $_POST['formTitle'];
    $formName = $_POST['formName'];
    $formEnquiry = $_POST['formEnquiry'];

    $sql = "INSERT INTO enquiries (Title, Name, Enquiry) VALUES ('$formTitle', '$formName', '$formEnquiry')";
    $conn->query($sql);
?>

I hope this will solve your problem.

Answer 2

SIMPLE ANSWER: MySQL

A LITTLE BIT MORE DEVELOPED ANSWER: MySQL is in basic terms the combination of PHP and SQL to create an easy way to do various actions to a database, which include:

• Create table
• Query table
• Update table
• and much more

There are variations of MySQL, including MySQLi and MySQL (PDO).

an example of connecting to your database via MySQL (PDO) would be:

<?php
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$myDB = "databasename";

try {
    $conn = new PDO("mysql:host=$servername;dbname=$myDB", $username, $password);
    // set the PDO error mode to exception
    $conn->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);
    echo "Connected successfully"; 

    //insert code there that you want to execute...

    }
catch(PDOException $e)
    {
    echo "Connection failed: " . $e->getMessage();
    }
?>

you mentioned that you don't have a password, so you might just leave the "password" slot empty ("") I suppose, though this is very insecure and I recommend you place a password.

In the code above, there is a comment that says:

    //insert code there that you want to execute...

Here you would include code that would probably do actions similar to the ones mentioned above (query table, update table, etc). An example of code similar to that would be:

//htmlspecialchars takes out special characters that might
//exist in the posted information if someone were trying
//to hack your site via sql injection
$formTitle = htmlspecialchars($_POST['formTitle']);
$formName = htmlspecialchars($_POST['formName']);
$formEnquiry = htmlspecialchars($_POST['formEnquiry']);

$sql = "INSERT INTO enquiries (Title, Name, Enquiry) VALUES (formTitleBinded, formNameBinded, formEnquiryBinded)";

$sqlPrepared = $conn->prepare($sql);
$sqlPrepared->bindParam(':formTitleBinded',$formTitle);
$sqlPrepared->bindParam(':formNameBinded',$formName);
$sqlPrepared->bindParam('formEnquiryBinded',$formEnquiry);

$sqlPrepared->execute();

The previous code both sanitizes your input and inserts a row into your table with that information.

Let me know if that helped!

---

EDITED: My answer has been edited with parameter binding included to prevent SQL Injection.