foreach loop through specific $request - php

Question

I have a form that has several input types all that need to be a handled differently. I did a loop to name them like so in the form:
product-0-length
product-0-size
product-1-length
product-1-size
product-2-length
product-2-size
On my processing php (where the form info gets sent) I want to iterate a loop to handle say size different from length. My thought was this but no luck:
<?php
$i = 0;
foreach($_REQUEST['product-'.$i.'-length'] as $key => $val) {
//style or do what I need with the length information for each product
echo '<li>'.$key.'='.$val .'</li>';
$i++;
}
?>

Answer 1

As I suggested in the comments above you could use a different naming scheme for your input fields. Take a look at this example for the form creation:
<?php
foreach ($i=0; $i<3; $i++) {
echo "<input type=\"text\" name=\"product[$i][length]\">\n";
echo "<input type=\"text\" name=\"product[$i][size]\">\n";
}
When submitting this form the server will translate the notation into a php array which is a very convenient thing. You can simply iterate over that array:
<?php
foreach ($_POST['product'] as $key=>$product) {
echo "<li>Length of product $key: " . $product['length'] . "</li>\n";
echo "<li>Size of product $key: " . $product['size'] . "</li>\n";
}
Note that this is a very primitive example, all error checking and the like is missing to keep things crunch. Also I did not test this code here, it is just meant to point you into the right direction, but I hope there are not too many typos in there...