Posted by Mason Barge on 10/08/73 12:00

"Good Man" <heyho@letsgo.com> wrote in message
news:Xns9A267B2AAC6C7sonicyouth@216.196.97.131...
> "Mason Barge" <masonbarge@comcast.net> wrote in
> news:NfidnfLSQ8PTQhHanZ2dnUVZ_hOdnZ2d@comcast.com:
>
>> I have a standard POST form consisting of two types of input: text
>> input and textarea. The form downloads current settings from a mysql
>> database. The user can update the information by modifying the text
>> and clicking a standard "submit" button.
>>
>> MAIN PROBLEM:
>>
>> My problem is that the information transmitted to the formhandler
>> apparently has some sort of whitespace added to it. If I simply use
>> trim() on the POST variable, it fails the regex.
>
> No it doesn't. You are confused about what a post variable is. You
> can't change what's been $_POSTed, but you can certainly ASSIGN the
> value to your own variable and change *that*.
>
>> If I convert to POST
>> variable to a single variable and use trim(), it solves the problem.
>
> As explained above.
>
>
>> I can just convert and trim every variable, but it would be a lot
>> cleaner to trim the entire POST array with a foreach(). Plus, I'd much
>> rather understand the problem. In other words:
>>
>> This code works:
>> $zip=trim($_POST['zip']);
>> if (preg_match("/^[\d]{5}/", $zip)) {
>> $update.=" zip='$zip',";
>> } else {
>> error_alert('Zip code must be exactly 5 digits with no other
>> characters. '); }
>>
>> This code throws a regex rejection:
>>
>> $_POST['zip']=trim($_POST['zip']);
>
> as hinted at above - what are you doing here? why are you trying to
> *set* a $_POST variable, which has a very specific meaning? Why are you
> using this code at all, as opposed to the code above which does what you
> want in the correct way???
>
> Are you trying to trim the $_POST elements in one fail swoop? Well you
> can either use array_map to apply a trim-type function to the $_POST
> array, but be aware that it will mess up any $_POST elements which are
> arrays themselves (unless you use one of the user contributions on the
> manual page). Personally, I specifically trim every $_POST'ed element.
>

Thanks for the response, it was very helpful.

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