Unlike Luke, I'm not familiar with this book. However, it's a pretty safe bet that it was written prior to the first version of PHP that defaulted register_globals to OFF. All of your variables for the second page will be found in the global array $_POST[] because the method for the form on the first page is POST. If you are developing on a private system, you can set register_globals ON in php.ini so that what you are learning will follow the book. As soon as you get a bit more experience, turn the register_globals back off and revise your scripts to work with the global arrays. The revision needs to be nothing more than a series of statements near the beginning of a page to initialize the local variables to the global array values. For example, $searchtype = $_POST['searchtype']; ... etc. ... Then the rest of your script(s) should work as written. Enjoy, Doug --Original Message Text--- From: Luke Woollard Date: Mon, 7 Apr 2003 11:34:01 +1000 Dude - sweet book. I bought it myself when i was starting out. Your problem is due to the PHP error message setting in the php.ini file. Whack this at the beginning of your scripts: // Report simple running errors error_reporting (E_ERROR | E_WARNING | E_PARSE); When you know more - check out the php.ini file and read about the error level.. And this page in the PHP manual: http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.error-reporting.php Cheers, Luke Woollard -----Original Message----- From: Gilles [mailto:webmaster@bionix.net] Sent: Monday, 7 April 2003 11:18 AM To: php-db@lists.php.net Subject: Can't do anything with variables Hi all, Sorry for this really beginner question (PHP-Newbie here). I bought the book "PHP and MySQL web developpement" (Welling & Thompson) and I'm trying to recreate the exemples and it won't work. I installed PHP 4.3.1 and MySQL 4.0.12. The easy part. Here's a simple form page (from the book): SEARCH.HTML Book-O-Rama Catalog Search Book-O-Rama Catalog Search Choose Search Type: Author Title ISBN Enter Search Term: And now the processing page: RESULTS.PHP Book-O-Rama Search Results Book-O-Rama Search Results Number of books found: ".$num_results.""; for ($i=0; $i ".($i+1).". Title: "; echo stripslashes($row["title"]); echo " Author: "; echo stripslashes($row["author"]); echo " ISBN: "; echo stripslashes($row["isbn"]); echo " Price: "; echo stripslashes($row["price"]); echo ""; } ?> The problem. Even if I fill both fields, I always get "Notice: Undefined variable: searchtype" The only way it would work is if I remove all the "if" part and leave the "select * from books" (without the where clause). I don't get it. Any help would be much appreciated. Regards Gilles -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php