Changes

The first step involves creation on of an HTML page to contain our form. The form will be very simple in that it will contain only a text area for the user to enter data and a submit button with which to send it to the server. We will use the POST method of transmitting the data to the server and specify "subscribe.php" as the server side script to hanlde handle the data:

Now that we have created a form we need to understand how to process the data enter entered by the user in our server side PHP script. There are two mechanisms for transmitted transmitting the data form from an HTML form to the server, GET and POST. In our example above we specified POST, but in either case the task of reading this data in our PHP script is equally simple.

Up until now we have only concerned ourselves with data which only holds one value (the text in a text field for example). Clearly, in this case there is the potential for multiple data values to be associated with a single form element. The way PHP handles this is to place the multiple selections in an array. Before that happens, however, we need to make a small modification to our declaration of the HTML Select element. All we need to do to turn this data into an array is to place [] after the element name: