PHP Tutorial: Getting user input in PHP using HTML form

There are basically three ways in PHP to get user input. They are
  • Using HTML Form
  • Using URL values links
  • Using COOKIES
In this tutorial, I shall talk how to use HTML Form to get user input and retrieve that values from a web server. Form is simple HTML form start with
tag and end with

. The form is posted to the server using POST method and each data user has entered is stored in a PHP super global variable $\$\_POST$.  $\$\_POST$ is an associative array that stores variables in key => value format. Let us take an example of simple HTML form with two fields: username and password.

    
         Simple Form 
    
    
        
            Username:             Password:                    
   

The name of the field username is ‘username’ and field password is ‘password’. The name actually stores an index in the $\$\_POST$ array and we can retrieve the value using this name a the index of the array. For example to retrieve the value of username, we can print $_POST'[‘username’] and similar is the case for password. So lets make another file retrieve.php to print the values of username and password.