Ternary Operator on form action - php

Question

I am new to PHP, but what I want is for the page to self-process (contact.php) if there's an error, but go to another PHP page (contactconfirm.php) if it passes validation. Can someone tell me what's wrong with this code?
if(isset($_POST['submit'])){
if(empty($name)) {
$errors ++ ;
echo "<p>You did not enter a name.</p>";
} else {
$errors = 0;
}
if(empty($email)) {
$errors ++ ;
echo "<p>You did not enter an e-mail.</p>";
} else {
$cleanEmail = filter_var($email, FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);
if (!filter_var($cleanEmail, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)){
$errors ++;
echo "<p>Invalid e-mail. Please try again.</p>";
} else {
$errors = 0;
}
}
} //closes isset
?>
<div class="contact-form">
<div class="inputArea">
<form action="<?php echo ($errors > 0) ? 'contact.php' : 'contactconfirm.php' ?>" method="post">

Answer 1

Every time you pass a verification stage, you reset $errors to 0.
e.g.
check if "foo" is correct: nope, increments $errors -> `1`
check if "bar" is correct: yep, reset $errors to 0
if ($errors == 0)
everything is perfect! happy joy joy!
}
but oops, "foo" was wrong, and now you've said everything was ok, because your error counter got reset. Simply remove ALL of the $errors = 0 from inside your verification/validation stages.

Answer 2

See Marc B's answer to point out the first initial problem.
You reset your $errors = 0 in the else of each check. You must remove these statements, otherwise if the later check statements are valid, the $errors variable will be reset.
Also, it would be much better to not print the errors during the checks, but rather to append to an error array, and check the errors variable after all of the error checking has occurred.
e.g.
if($errors>0){
print_r($errorArray);
}
or
if($errors>0){
foreach($errorArray as $error){
echo $error;
}
}
Also, it is unclear without the rest of your code, but it seems like the top half is validation after being redirected to this page, but that will never occur, because you are automatically setting the form action to contactconfirm.php in the first place, since $errors will not have a value on first page load. I may be misinterpreting your code without the full page though.
You should consider removing the turnary operator in your form, and having the action always be contact.php.
Then you can use conditional logic to check if there are no errors, and if not, redirect using header("Location: contactconfirm.php"). See this documentation on header for more info.