PHP access all $_POST[] variables into an array?

Question

how to capture all fields in the $_POST VARIABLE? into an array?

$email = $_POST;
$emails = array_keys($email);
foreach($emails as $email) {
            


        

Answer 1

$_POST is already an array. Why not just pass that?

Answer 2

Hmm...would something like this help?

<?php
// blank array to hold emails
$emails = array();

foreach ( $_POST as $key => $value )
{
    if ( preg_match('/email/', $key) )
    {
        $this_email = $value;
        // quick check to see if it is valid
        $this_email = filter_var($this_email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);
        // also escape it to prevent SQL injections
        $this_email = $mysqli->real_escape_string($this_email);
        $emails[] = $this_email;
    }
}

// $emails is now a nice, clean array of email addresses
$emailadd->insert_email_into_database($emails);

echo '<pre>';
print_r($emails);
echo '</pre>';
?>

<form method="post" action="index.php">
    <input type="text" name="email1" /><br />
    <input type="text" name="email2" /><br />
    <input type="text" name="email3" /><br />
    <input type="submit" />
</form>

Answer 3

If you want to capture a list from a POSTed form, then use the array syntax trick instead of enumerated input field names:

<input type="email" name="emails[]">
<input type="email" name="emails[]">
<input type="email" name="emails[]">

This way you need no guessing in PHP, because emails[] becomes an array implicitely then:

print_r($_POST["emails"]);
foreach ($_POST["emails"] as $email) {

For database-escaping just use:

$db_emails = array_map("mysql_real_escape_string", $_POST["emails"]);
// that's an array too