Excluding Empty Records When Using PHP to Insert into MySQL DB

Question

I have a page that contains the allows a user to enter up to 10 records in a database. The problem I'm having is that in many (most) cases, the user will only enter one or two records in, but the database insert is processing all of the blank records and inserting them as well. I've configured the DB to not accept NULL values, but I suspect the blank values are not quite equivalent to NULL and that's why the records are still being inserted. How can I code this so that blank records are not inserted into the database.

Current Insert Code:

    <?php
if (isset($_POST['submit'])) {  

for($i = 0; $i < 10; $i++)
{

$indtypeid = $_POST['indtype'][$i];
$indicator = $_POST['indicator'][$i];
$actorid = $_POST['actor'][$i];
$reportid = $_POST['report'][$i];

print 'Row ' . $i . ': '  . $indtypeid . '-' . $indicator . '-' . $actorid . '<br/>';

$qry_digestreport = "INSERT INTO indicator (indtypeid,indicator,actorid,reportid) VALUES ('$indtypeid', '$indicator', '$actorid', '$reportid')";


if (!mysql_query($qry_digestreport,$connection))
  {
  die('Error: ' . mysql_error());
  }
echo "<br/>Records added!<br/>";

Marc B · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-10 18:53:30Z

2

A simple if() check would do:

if (empty($indtypeid) || empty($indicator) || ....) {
   continue; // jump to next loop iteration
}

right after your $_POST assignments.

Note that your code is utterly vulnerable to SQL injection attacks, so you might want to read a bit about that on http://bobby-tables.com

answered Apr 10, 2012 at 18:53

Marc B

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1 Comment

Chris Sanders Over a year ago

Worked like a charm. Many thanks. A bit of a novice at this, so planning to get input validation sorted out after I get the core functionality working. The link you provided should be of some good help as well. Thanks!

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