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PHP - $_POST

$_POST is one of the predefined or superglobal variables in PHP. It is an associative array of key-value pairs passed to a URL by the HTTP POST method that uses URLEncoded or multipart/form-data content-type in the request.

  • $HTTP_POST_VARS also contains the same information as $_POST, but is not a superglobal, and now been deprecated.

  • The easiest way to send data to a server with POST request is specifying the method attribute of HTML form as POST.

Assuming that the URL in the browser is "http://localhost/hello.php", method=POST is set in a HTML form "hello.html" as below −

<html>
<body>
   <form action="hello.php" method="post">
      <p>First Name: <input type="text" name="first_name"/> </p>
      <p>Last Name: <input type="text" name="last_name" /> </p>
      <input type="submit" value="Submit" />
   </form>
</body>
</html>

The "hello.php" script (in the document root folder) for this exercise is as follows:

<?php
   echo "<h3>First name: " . $_POST['first_name'] . "<br /> " . 
   "Last Name: " . $_POST['last_name'] . "</h3>";
?>

Now, open http://localhost/hello.html in your browser. You should get the following output on the screen −

PHP $ POST 1

As you press the Submit button, the data will be submitted to "hello.php" with the POST method.

PHP $ POST 2

You can also mix the HTML form with PHP code in hello.php, and post the form data to itself using the "PHP_SELF" variable −

<html>
<body>
   <form action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];?>" method="post">
      <p>First Name: <input type="text" name="first_name"/> </p> <br />
      <p>Last Name: <input type="text" name="last_name" /></p>
      <input type="submit" value="Submit" />
   </form>
   <?php
      echo "<h3>First Name: " . $_POST['first_name'] . "<br /> " . 
      "Last Name: " . $_POST['last_name'] . "</h3>";
   ?>
</body>
</html>

It will produce the following output −

PHP $ POST 3
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