Programming for the linux desktop

Option 1: by e-mail

<FORM ACTION="mailto:name@address.com" METHOD=post>
...
</FORM>

• When the user clicks on submit, the contents of the form are emailed to the address specified.
• The email will have the title "Form posted from Mozilla", and will consist of name1=value1,name2=value2 pairs.
• The data, if it contains quotes, and special characters, will be URL encoded
• Normally, the user will be asked if they wish to proceed when sending this type of form over email

Option 2: using JavaScript

Using JavaScript, you can access the data on a page from JavaScript code within that page, treating it as a normal
variable.
For example, if you have the form:

<FORM NAME="searchform">
<INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="searchstring">
<INPUT TYPE="button" VALUE="Go!" onClick="processForm();">
</FORM>

The form will look like this:

When the user clicks on Go! your javascript function processForm() will be called.
Your processing routine might look like this:

<SCRIPT language="JavaScript1.1">
function processForm()        //Processes search form
{

//Get the text entered into the text box
value_of_text_box=document.searchform.searchstring.value;

//If no text was entered
if (value_of_text_box=="")

        //You can change the contents of text boxes
        document.searchform.searchstring.value="new text";

//And display the result
alert("You typed "+value_of_text_box);

}
</SCRIPT>

Option 3: Using PHP

With PHP, you can load a new page, passing the form data as parameters.  Set up the form as follows.

<FORM NAME="searchform" ACTION="form_processing.php3" METHOD="get">
<INPUT TYPE="text" NAME="searchstring">
<INPUT TYPE="submit" VALUE="Go!">
</FORM>

The file form_processing.php3 will be loaded as soon as the user clicks Go!, and the form's variables can be directly referred to:

<?php
if($searchform_searchstring=="forms")
echo "My forms page - click here";
?>

Note that an underscore is used to obtain object proprties - this is a conversion done by PHP, to avoid gettingconfused with the . string concatenation operator.

Option 4: Using a server-side script

If you set the form's action to PUT, and set the action to a CGI script on your server, the form data will be sent to this script for processing. Look up information on Perl, as a starting point.

(Valid HTML 4.01)