How can I get a PHP value from an HTML form?

I have an HTML form as follows:

<form enctype="multipart/form-data" action=" " method="post">
<input name="username" type="text"/>
<input type="submit" value="Upload" class="btn btn-primary"/><br/>
</form>

I want that the user of this form enters data in the input box. Then I would like this data to be the value of a PHP string – e.g. $username = "MY_NAME"; where MY_NAME is the value of the HTML form entered by the user.

If the input by the user in the input box is e.g. "STACKOVERFLOW" I want the PHP string to be $username = "STACKOVERFLOW";

Answer

When the form submits, you need to get the values from the $_POST array

You can do print_r($_POST) to see everything it contains (all of the form fields) and reference them individually as well.

Username will be $_POST['username']

I recommend reading a tutorial on working with forms and PHP… here’s a good one

Since you’re obviously a beginner I’ll help you out a bit more:

Give your submit button a name:

<form enctype="multipart/form-data" action="" method="post">
    <input name="username" type="text"/>
    <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Upload" class="btn btn-primary"/><br/>
</form>

Because action is blank, it will POST to the current page. At the top of your file, you can check to see if the form was submitted by checking if $_POST['submit'] is set (I gave your submit button that name).

if(isset($_POST['submit'])) {
    // form submitted, now we can look at the data that came through
    // the value inside the brackets comes from the name attribute of the input field. (just like submit above)
    $username = $_POST['username'];

    // Now you can do whatever with this variable.
}
// close the PHP tag and your HTML will be below