Topic awaiting preservation: Deleting selected (Page 1 of 1)

Ok, I've been working on having this control room of mine be able to delete all entrys that are selected (via checkbox). I've finaly got something that works but I'm not 100% sure why it works, and if there is anything wrong with it.

A form containing:

<input type="checkbox" name="deleted_items[]" "value="' . $id . '" />

Is submitted to:

if ($_POST["deleted_items"])
	{
		$deleted_items = join(', ', $_POST["deleted_items"]);
		$query = "DELETE FROM newsTable WHERE id IN ($deleted_items)";
		$result = mysql_query($query);
	}

I guess where I'm most confused is on the input name... how does the HTML name know that is an array? Sorry to be such a pain, if I don't know exactly what every line of code is doing I have trouble sleeping. I can't find the tutorial that lead me to this but I will keep searching and post it if I do.

Your HTML doesn't know.
Your PHP does, because of the '[]' attached to the end of the name. Because the brackets are empty, the array keys are set to the default (0,1,2...).

Ah, so how come in

$_POST["deleted_items"]

the brackets are not used?

quote:

---

redroy said:

$_POST["deleted_items"]

---

They are - $_POST [ "deleted_items" ]

=)

The brackets are empty in your HTML because they need to be filled in by the sequential numbers that are automatically inserted by the server side code. In your $POST[] example, you are designating the specific value you are looking for, ie 'deleted_items' which is a key in the $_POST[] array.



(Edited by DL-44 on 01-24-2006 05:26)

Oh man... I guess I need to read up on $_POST[] and arrays. I really haven't done anything that uses arrays so they confuse me just a bit. Thanks for all your help DL... you've been awesome.