I was working on this mini contact form the other day where a user basically enters in a bunch of info, the form submits to itself via PHP_SELF, and sends out an email. Oddly enough, once I transferred the form to its permanent home and spent a decent chunk of time trying to figure out why it wasn’t working anymore, I discovered that my developement box still had register_globals enabled from a previous project I was working on.  Doh!

This is part of my loop, which basically just grabs all the $_POST variables and their values to compare them with a previous array ($required) that specifies what values should be present in order for the mailer to determine how much of the form was completed:


// Values passed: domain,email

foreach($_POST as $name => $value) {
if(in_array($name,$required)){
if(empty($value) && value != 0 ){
$complete=0;
}else{
$complete=1;
}
}
}

(Ignore the fact that WordPress reformats my coding)

The problem is, when I went to use the names of the variables or their values later in the script, I got nothing. This of course would work with register_globals enabled, but since I prefer to work in a more secure environment, a small adjustment was needed in to make those variables available outside the loop:


// Values passed: domain,email


foreach($_POST as $name => $value) {
$$name = trim($value);
if(in_array($name,$required)){
if(empty($value) && value != 0 ){
$complete=0;
}else{
$complete=1;
}
}
}

Pretty simple stuff, eh? All I did here was tell the loop to actually create a variable and value for each $_POST value that was part of the foreach loop. From there, all I had to do was use these values are normal ($domain,$email,etc)

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