Getting value from multiple drop down menus in PHP - php

Question

Ive been battling away with the following problem
Ive got a page where I pull names from players specific to their positions in a sport squad.
Example: I will display all the Wings in the squad using a dropdown where a coach can then pick his wing for the game.
There are dropdowns for each different position
The aim of the page is to let the coach quickly select his team for a fixture
After the coach selected his team he will, select the opponents for which the selected team will play against.
When he clicks submit the selected oppents and players will get stored in two arrays which will get called to display the team selected and their opponents on a new page. (After which it will get uploaded to the DB.)
I am having trouble getting the values from the select list to display on the new page.
I guess I have to do something like this on the new page:
foreach ($_REQUEST['opponents'] as $opponents){
print $opponents;
echo'<br>';
}
but it is not giving the desired results.
Strangely what gets printed is the variable name from the previous page select menu.
Upon further inspection I did a vardump on the new page and it says that $opponenets gets passed a value of string which is the variable name and not the value thereof?
My page looks like this
My question is how would I go abouts getting the values from the select dropdowns
if(isset($_POST["submit"]))
{
foreach ($_REQUEST['opponents'] as $against){
var_dump($against);
print $against;
echo'<br>';
}
}
else
{
echo'<h1>Select your Team</h1>';
$x = array("THP", "HKR", "LHP", "LH", "FLH"); //players positions gets assigned to x which will be used to query the database
echo '<form name="playerselect" method="post" action="">';
//query database with different query after each loop
for ($i = 0; sizeof($x) > $i; $i++)
{
//query where position field equeals variable x
$result = mysql_query("SELECT `name`, `position` FROM `player_info`
WHERE `position` = '$x[$i]'") or die(mysql_error()) ;
//Gets data from DB and assigns values to arrays below
while($row = mysql_fetch_array($result))
{
$playername[] = $row['name'];
$position[] = $row['position'];
}
//print player position
print $position[0];
echo'<br>';
//unset the array so that it is empty for the next query in the new loop
unset($position);
echo '<select name="players[]" >' ;
foreach ($playername as $name )
{
//Put playernames relevant to the position in the option element
echo'<option value="$name" selected="selected">'.$name;'</option>';
echo'<br>';
}
echo'</select>';
//unset array so that its contents is empty for the next query in the new loop
unset($playername);
echo'<br>';
}

Answer 1

You cannot. Your submit will only transmit select values. This is not a bug, it is a feature. You do not want to send data back and forth from/to the server/client which is known to both of them.
On the server you are free to query your database at any time. You can also cache your select list into the $_SESSION variable in your initial list read. However this is advanced fittling as your cache list may become outdated and also your server memory utilization must leave space for file caching (the SESSION cache goes to files).
If you go for the database query you may need some ID as sort of anchor. Just put the into the $_SESSION variable - eg.:
$_SESSION['positions']=$x;
In your example the $x seems to be static, which obviously reduces the need to cache it into the $_SESSION - however on other occasions you may need this method.