HTML Forms are a method of sending information from a page to a script. Forms
in HTML have the following form:
<form name="form1" id="form1" method="get" action="script.php">
</form>
here,
- name=”form1” is the name of the form, may be anything
- id=”form1” is usually same as the name of the form
- method=”get” is the method by which sending of data will take
place. It can also be “post”. - action=”script.php” is the name of the script to which the data
is to be passed to.
A form can have many child elements such as input box, password box, check
box etc. a form almost always has a submit button which on clicking sends the
data entered in various elements of the form to the “action” script.
We’d created the script in the previous post Taking
User Inputs to Create Personalized Pages, so we need not work on that,
here we’ll only create a HTML page having a form which will send the data
to that script. For this purpose, we need an input box for the user to enter
their name and obviously the submit button, as the form elements.
Look at the following HTML code:
<html>
<head>
<title>Enter Your Name</title>
</head>
<body>
<h2>Enter your name </h2>
<form name="form1" id="form1" method="get" action="name.php">
Name: <input name="name" type="text" />
<input name="submit" type="submit" id="submit" />
</form>
</body>
</html>
We have a form here which connects to the PHP script, we have an input box
with the name of the variable that the script takes and a submit button. That’s
it!
Put this HTML file and that script (form the post
Taking User Inputs to Create Personalized Pages) in the same directory
on a server and you’re ready to go.
Open the HTML page in the browser type in the name, click on submit and bingo!
The script got the data via this form.
Now look at the address bar it’d be showing something like:
http://localhost/temp/lcp/name.php?name=PHP+Rocks&submit=Submit
So we can conclude that a form is a way of sending data to some script. The
value of each elements including the buttons is sent when submit button is pressed.
That’s it for this post guys. Do check back for updates!
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