PHP - Missing spaces/underscores in POST key

Question

I have an HTML form:

<html>
    <body>
        <form method="post" action="test.php">
            <input type="text" name="     TEST   " value="   TEST     "/>
            <input type="submit" />
        </form>
    </body>
</html>

It submits to the following PHP page:

<?php
var_dump($_POST);

When I submit the form without modifying any values, the resulting page displays:

array(1) { ["TEST___"]=> string(12) " TEST " }

Where did the left spaces/underscores go in the key name? How can I get the left spaces/underscores back?

Possible duplicate with : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17092398/post-spaces-converted-in-underscores ? — Kalzem, Jun 17 '13 at 22:31
No. I already looked at that. It explains why the spaces are being converted to underscores, but not where the left spaces/underscores went. @BabyAzerty — ITS Alaska, Jun 17 '13 at 22:33

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:13

They were dropped, you can't. According to HTML 4 spec: ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".").

The working draft for HTML 5 is even more permissive, saying only that an id must contain at least one character and may not contain any space characters. See: What are valid values for the id attribute in HTML?

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 17 '13 at 22:35

0

don't use spaces for the name attribute to be on the safe side.

answered Jun 17 '13 at 22:35

jancha

4,873
1
21
35

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 17 '13 at 22:36

0

Why would you want your input name to contain all those spaces? Might there be a better solution to what you're trying to achieve, perhaps?

answered Jun 17 '13 at 22:36

ekreutz

26
1

I have a form for updating survey results. The point is to normalize the data, and I'm doing mass replaces of one field value with another where the $_POST key is the original value, and the $_POST value is the new value. Sure I could use a multi-dimensional array, but that adds a new level of complexity to this simple problem that can be solved using the keys and values of a single array. – ITS Alaska Jun 17 '13 at 22:40

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Oct 18 '19 at 09:14

&nbsp worked for me

<html>
<body>
    <form method="post" action="test.php">
        <input type="text" name="&nbsp&nbspTEST&nbsp&nbsp" value="   TEST     "/>
        <input type="submit" />
    </form>
</body>

&nbsp - Single space, for more spaces use more

PHP - Missing spaces/underscores in POST key

4 Answers4