Create search box with json Data using PHP - php

Question

im newbie how to create multi search box like this https://imgur.com/yPWUKAL ? my data is from json and im using php prog. my goal is get the value input by user then transfer to my function.
// create & initialize a curl session
$curl = curl_init();
$url = "data.json";
// set our url with curl_setopt()
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
// return the transfer as a string, also with setopt()
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
// curl_exec() executes the started curl session
// $data_curl contains the output string
$data_curl = curl_exec($curl);
// close curl resource to free up system resources
// (deletes the variable made by curl_init)
curl_close($curl);
$data_json = json_decode( $data_curl );
if( !empty( $data_json )){
// fetch data
foreach ($data_json as $data ){
$loc_data = $data->location->city;
if( $loc_data == "San Francisco" ){
echo $loc_data;
}
}
}
else {
echo "No Data!";
}
?>
<form id="form" action="#" method="POST">
<input type="text" placeholder="Keyword" />
<input type="text" placeholder="Location" />
<input type="text" placeholder="Distance" />
<input type="submit" value="Search">
</form>

Answer 1

You need to understand the request cycle and the difference between client and server side code. PHP is a server side language, all the PHP code executes on a server and the output (whatever you echo, whatever HTML you write) is then sent to the client to be rendered in their browser.
To get user input (such as your form) you need to start a new request, i.e. when the form is submitted it starts a new request to the server, only the request now contains the data from the form in the $_POST superglobal.
Firstly, you need to add names to the inputs, as the name you use will be the key in the $_POST array, and the corresponding value will be the users input. E.g.
<input type="text" placeholder="Keyword" name="keyword">
Then whatever the user enters after submitting the form will be in $_POST['keyword'].
Secondly, you need to tell the form where to submit to using the action value. In this instance, you probably want it to submit back to the same php file, or you could move your function to retrieve data into another php file and then have the code submit to there. Assuming that your file is called search.php and people go to https://my.website/search.php to see the search box you would have the following:
<form id="form" action="/search.php" method="POST">
<input type="text" name="keyword" placeholder="Keyword">
<input type="text" name="location" placeholder="Location">
<input type="text" name="distance" placeholder="Distance">
<button type="submit">Submit</button>
</form>
Thirdly, when your script runs you need to check to see if there is any user input or not. If the user is just landing on your search page and hasn't filled the form out yet then there won't be any input for you to get. You can do this with a simple if statement and check the value of $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] to check if the request was a POST or a GET. Initial loads of the page without the form submission will use a GET request, where as form submissions will use a POST request.
if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'POST') {
// User has filled out the form, we can get location specific data
// ... your curl to fetch the data
if (!empty($data_json)) {
foreach ($data_json as $data) {
if ($data->location->city == $_POST['location']) {
echo $data->location->city;
}
}
}
}