prevent negative numbers but accept decimals? HTML

Question

Is there's a way to prevent negative numbers but accept decimals? I'm using PHP and HTML

<input type="number" min="0" id="Student" name="course[]" value="<?php  echo $_POST['course'][3]; ?>"/></p>

Answer 1

Your code theoretically works. It prevents negative numbers and accepts decimals.

I think what you're really asking is this: Is there a float input type in HTML5?

to which the top answer suggests that you would write:

<input type="number" min="0" step="0.01" name="course[]">

The thing that matters the most though is not client-side validation, but server-side validation. In the PHP code that accepts this input, you have to validate that the input is valid as follows:

if(is_numeric($_POST['course'][3]) && floatval($_POST['course'][3]) >= 0) {
    // The rest of your code.
}

To do this for all the courses, you would most likely write:

foreach($_POST['course'] as $k => $v) {
    if(!(is_numeric($v) && floatval($v) >= 0)) {
        echo "Input needs to be a number.";
        break;
    }
    // Process the course $_POST['course'][$k] here.
}

The main reason you have to check if it's a number in server-side too is that someone with certain knowledge about browsers can just open the browser console and edit the attributes of the input removing the type="number", allowing him to send you virtually any text.

Someone with even more knowledge can send you cURL requests.