Processing Jquery Post with PHP - php

Question

I've been at this for hours, and i'm at a complete loss.... I've tried everything I can but the problem is that i'm not very familiar with Jquery, this is the first time I've ever used it.... Basically, i'm attempting to pass form data to a php script, and then return a variable which will contain the source code of a webpage.
Here is the jquery:
$("button").click(function(){
hi = $("#domain").serialize();
var page;
$.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: "webcrawler.php",
data: hi,
//dataType: "text",
success: function(data){
page = data;
document.write(page);
}
});
});
Here is the html it references:
<div id="contact_form">
<form name="contact" action="">
<fieldset>
<label for="domain" id="domain_label">Name</label>
<input type="text" name="domain" id="domain" size="30" value="" class="text-input" />
<input type="submit" name="submit" class="button" id="submit_btn" value="Send" />
</fieldset>
</form>
</div>
Here is the PHP that process it:
$search = $_POST["domain"];
if(!$fp = fopen($search,"r" )) {
return false;
}
fopen($search,"r" );
$data = "";
while(!feof($fp)) {
$data .= fgets($fp, 1024);
}
fclose($fp);
return $data;
?>
I think the variable $search is blank, but is that because i'm not sending it correctly with jquery or receiving it correctly with php? Thanks!

Answer 1

Well, when you serialize form data using jQuery, you should serialize the <form>, not the <input> field.
So try this:
$("button").click(function() {
var formData = $('form[name="contact"]').serialize();
var page;
$.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: "webcrawler.php",
data: formData,
success: function(data) {
page = data;
document.write(page);
}
});
});

Answer 2

See you have to do several things:
$("form[id='contact_form']").submit(function (e) {//<---instead click submit form
e.preventDefault(); //<----------------you have to stop the submit for ajax
Data = $(this).serialize(); //<----------$(this) is form here to serialize
var page;
$.ajax({
type: "POST",
url: "webcrawler.php",
data: Data,
success: function (data) {
page = data;
document.write(page);
}
});
});
So as in comments:
Submit form instead button click
Stop the form submission otherwise page will get refreshed.
$(this).serialize() is serializing the form here because here $(this) is the form itself.