Processing this form

Question

I was given this form by a designer who built it in html and I need to create some php to process the form. However, when I tested the form to see if it would pass variables, $_POST was empty. When, however, I changed the method to get, I could access the variables fine. Can anyone see where the error is?

Here is the code:

<form action="process/appointment.php" method="post" accept-charset="utf-8" enctype="text/plain" id="appointments">
 <input type="text" placeholder="Contact Name..." name="contactName" style="width:150px;"/>
 <input type="text" placeholder="Contact Telephone..." name="contactTel" style="width:150px;"/>
 <!--<input type="image" src="images/send_purple.gif" alt="send appointment request" style="margin-top:0; height:auto; border:none;"/>-->
 <input type="submit" value="submit">
</form>

EDIT

Here is the page I was using to test the receipt of the variables:

<?php
print_r($_POST); print_r($_GET); 
?>

$_POST returns an empty array when the form is set to post, but $_GET returns the values when the for is set to get.

• Norse: How were you testing the variables to see if they were empty? Show your receiving PHP page.
• Yaniro: Did you try removing the enctype from the <form> tag?

Answer 1

Your enctype is wrong, you need enctype="multipart/form-data"

Swap this line :

<form action="process/appointment.php" method="post" accept-charset="utf-8" enctype="text/plain" id="appointments">

to

<form action="process/appointment.php" method="post" accept-charset="utf-8" enctype="multipart/form-data" id="appointments">

• Quentin: There is no <input type="file">
• ilanco: You are right, but this will work in any case, with or without file upload
• Phil Young: Thanks, this worked. I wasn't aware that text/plain didn't allow the data to be used via the post method.
• TRiG: Or just leave no enctype, which will default to enctype="aplication/x-www-form-urlencoded", which is a smaller transfer than multipart/form-data, and just as easily processed by PHP.

Answer 2

enctype="text/plain" doesn't make much sense. Remove it.

If it is doing anything at all, it is telling the browser to encode the data in a way that PHP can't convert to $_POST.