What's wrong with me PHP code to get form values into text file?

Question

Here's the form:

<form>
    <form action="" method="post">
    <input type="text" id="name" name="name" placeholder="Name">
    <input type="text" id="message" name="message" 
placeholder="Grateful for?">
    <br>
    <br>
    <input type=submit value="&#10086;">
    <input type="reset" value="&#x2716;">
</form>

Here's the code:

<?php
if(isset($_POST['submit'])){
$Name = $_POST['name'];
$Message = $_POST['message'];
$file = fopen("post.txt", "a");
fwrite($file, $Name, $Message);

fclose($file);

}
?>

Form is asking for input of a 'name' and a short 'message', those values should be available with PHP $_POST superglobal. Is my syntax correct with the "$Name" or "Message" variable associated with the $_POST variable?

The $file variable looks correctly set to my post.txt and am I writing out correct syntax for fwrite and fclose?

The
tag? What are you asking?
– Jordan Boehm 'J.Dawg' Apr 20 '20 at 22:46 — Jordan Boehm 'J.Dawg', Apr 20 '20 at 22:46
Ya
to open the form and
to close it. – Jordan Boehm 'J.Dawg' Apr 20 '20 at 22:53 — Jordan Boehm 'J.Dawg', Apr 20 '20 at 22:53
No. Your first two tags are both form tags. – AbraCadaver Apr 20 '20 at 22:54 — AbraCadaver, Apr 20 '20 at 22:54
Oh! ya ur right, the form action I thought was one tag – Jordan Boehm 'J.Dawg' Apr 20 '20 at 22:57 — Jordan Boehm 'J.Dawg', Apr 20 '20 at 22:57

Robo Robok · Answer 1 · 2020-04-20T21:54:56.640

0

In order to receive $_POST['submit'], you need to have a field with name="submit".

You can set that name to your submit button:

<input name="submit" type="submit" value="&#10086;">

Also, keep in mind that fwrite() has the following signature:

fwrite ( resource $handle , string $string [, int $length ] ) : int

You can simplify your code with file_put_contents() though:

file_put_contents('post.txt', "$Name\n$Message\n", FILE_APPEND);

I'm assuming you want to have your name and message separated by new line character in the file and you want to append to the file.

edited Apr 20 '20 at 21:54

answered Apr 20 '20 at 21:49

Robo Robok

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Right, even trickier get name bold and message regular – Jordan Boehm 'J.Dawg' Apr 20 '20 at 21:57
Do you store multiple posts in that file or just one? – Robo Robok Apr 20 '20 at 21:59
Every post yes in that one file – Jordan Boehm 'J.Dawg' Apr 20 '20 at 22:00
Then appending looks like a good idea, as saving will be fast. But keep in mind that if someone puts a new line character to the message, it can get tricky (or impossible) to retrieve data, because you no longer know where each post ends in the file. – Robo Robok Apr 20 '20 at 22:02
Ya I've also got the option for every post to have its own file. I also want a css line border and faint grey fill to differentiate posts. – Jordan Boehm 'J.Dawg' Apr 20 '20 at 22:41
The styling is another topic. You need to start from storing data somehow. Have you considered database? – Robo Robok Apr 20 '20 at 22:45
Ya MySQL to store my login user and passwords, I guess posts could be there too. – Jordan Boehm 'J.Dawg' Apr 20 '20 at 22:48
I encourage you to use database for storing posts for sure. It will be much easier in the long run to maintain your posts in the database. – Robo Robok Apr 20 '20 at 22:50
My host says: Database Space Limit: 1GB Database Table Limit: 100 Tables Manage your database at databases.000webhost.com Use localhost as a connection hostname. does 100 tables mean theoretically only 100 posts? Or do you think that means 100 databases? – Jordan Boehm 'J.Dawg' Apr 20 '20 at 23:09
These limits are perfectly fine. 1 GB is quite a lot of data and 100 tables is more than enough for most projects. – Robo Robok Apr 20 '20 at 23:10
So by 100 tables they mean I can make 100 database files? just want to be sure. – Jordan Boehm 'J.Dawg' Apr 20 '20 at 23:21

What's wrong with me PHP code to get form values into text file?

1 Answers1