input (radio) value consists of ~2000 bytes, is there a better way? - php

Question

I have a MySQL database that stores items (goods and services), and along with each item, terms (terms and conditions) will also be stored, which can be roughly 2000 bytes.
http://i.imgur.com/7t3cvSE.png
This is my basic set up
$term_options = array();
$term_options[] = "None";
$term_options[] = "massive string containing 2000 bytes or more";
...
foreach ($term_options as $term) {
?>
<label class="term">
<input type="radio" name="terms" value="<?php echo $term; ?>">
<?php echo $term; ?>
</label>
<?php
}
The above code does exactly what I want, but it feels wrong to have a massive value within a radio input (which may contain Unicode characters). Am I wrong to worry?
Before, I used a SELECT menu with option values equal to the index position of each array item:
?>
<select name="terms">
<?php
$i = 0;
for ($i = 0; $i < count($term_options); $i++) {
?>
<option><?php echo $i; ?></option>
<?php
}
?>
</select>
<?php
Then my $_POST would look something like this:
$terms = $term_options[$_POST['terms']];
It worked nicely until it came to my update form which should display the currently selected values. I wasn't sure how to compare the isset value with something generated via array.
It's simple to do this with static values, e.g.:
<option <?php if (isset($row['x']) && $row['x'] === 'x') echo 'selected'; ?>>x</option>
but while creating each option in a foreach loop, I have no idea what to do and the below doesn't work:
<option <?php if (isset($row['x']) && $row['x'] === $term_options[$i]) echo 'selected'; ?>><?php echo $i; ?></option>
$i++;

Answer 1

Yes, you are right in your worries. If this page is going to display many of these items and each item has a massive string like this, the final page is going to be huge. An this page will be sent by your server to the client browser. Bigger the page, bigger the time.
You are retrieving these items from a MySQL database. Each item probably has a primary key. Why don't you just use this primary key as part of the name of the radio buttons and then you may retrieve again just the selected item?
Something like
<input type="radio" name="rb_1">
where this "1" appended to "rb_" is the key of an item. Then you just need to break this string, recover the primary key and search if to recover the huge string.
This may generate another database operation, of course. But this will be nothing when compared with the transmission of a huge page with, say, 100 times 2k items.