Bobbis.net

At work, I was tasked to create a multidimensional form. For example. The user was going to define X number of animals, and each animal was to have X number of syndromes, and each syndrome for each animal could have X number of lesions.

So in programming you can set this up as a multidimensional array. Say you were interested in the name of the 2nd lesion of the 1st syndrome of the 23rd animal, $animal[22][syndrome][0][lesion][1][name]. Pretty simple. But, how the hell do we implement that into an HTML form (without JavaScript)?

I learned that since PHP 4, there is now support for multidimensional forms. Like so:

<pre>
<?php

print_r($_POST);

?>
</pre>
<form method="post" name="main" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>">
<input type="text" name="field[0][name]" value="zero" />
<blockquote>
	<input type="text" name="field[0][sub][0]" value="zeroSub0" />
	<input type="text" name="field[0][sub][1]" value="zeroSub1" />
</blockquote>
<br />
<input type="text" name="field[1][name]" value="one" />
<blockquote>
	<input type="text" name="field[1][sub][0]" value="oneSub0" />
	<input type="text" name="field[1][sub][1]" value="oneSub1" />
</blockquote>
<br />
<input type="submit" name="submit" value="submit" />
</form>

To extend this further, you can just code inside a loop as follows:

<input type="text" name="field[<?php echo $fieldID; ?>][sub][<php echo $subID; ?>] />

when posted this can be accessed as an array in the $_POST array:

$_POST['field'][$fieldID]['sub'][$subID]

or

$_POST['field'][22]['sub'][0]

No string parsing or explode()ing necessary.