I have built an empty associative array whos keynames refer to submitted post data. I can capture the postdata just fine, but I run into trouble trying to instantiate varia
The solution is change
$key = stripslashes(filter_input(INPUT_POST, $key));
to
$$key = stripslashes(filter_input(INPUT_POST, $key));
See http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.variables.variable.php
Also, recheck your code, which are doing some mistakes..