Hi guys, I was trying to figure out this problem for whole day without getting anywhere. I'm quite inexperienced in php but I'm doing my best.

I have this LAMP thingie running on my server, it's a simple php driven website where i can do queries against my mysql database and also add new stuff.

For that i designed a form. This is a recording-database, and one among the fields that I fill in is a "Date" field (not a date datatype in mysql, put simply a varchar to make it more simple). What I need to do in php is to make a conditional statement so that, if I leave this field untouched (empty) and hit 'Submit' with other fields filled in properly - the date form should automatically get the value 'unknown' and the query should be done successfully with this Date=unknown value. I tried to make it work something like this (i'm only including relevant fields in the code so you get a picture what I'm talking about):

So basically, what I was expecting this would do was, in case I didn't fill in the date - it would do the insert query to the database with all other stuff added (according to what I filled in) + date = unknown. What it does, however, is that it does a successful addition to my mysql database but date remains empty. How do I successfully declare this variable? First I thought it was something wrong with conditional-statement itself, so I altered it in debugging purposes, writing something like:
This time the program would stop without adding anything to database and print that error-message. So, the program seems to be reacting to the conditional. So it's only when I try to set the value to the variable and actually make it go through mysql - that I get my problems.

I hope I made myself clear.

Thanks in advance!

Hi -

I think you might simply have switched the meaning of "empty()" (is empty - nothing there) with "!empty()" (is NOT empty - you DO have a value in the field).

For example:

Hi, and thanks for the reply.
I did, of course, use empty (and not !empty) in the actual code. I just made a typo in this thread
So that was not the problem. I discovered, however, this morning, what was causing the problem - the fact that the mysql-query part of the code was stated under an "else" conditional, which simply made the program stop at the evaluation point of this $date variable and not do anything else. I got confused cause I wrote a whole bunch of nested conditional statements with rules what stuff may (not) be filled in the form. Anyway, now I solved the problem but I thank you for trying helping me out. I should really stop writing Bash scripts and PhP code late at night (same goes to posting to forums ).

Cheers.