Fhyujk

I have a webpage for homework. Students fill in the boxes, then click send to send the form.
My php thankyou file gets the answers and sends to my email. I download the emails and use Python to check each answer against the correct answer, line for line using readlines().

This morning I noticed, one student missed the first part, 1 to 5 'choose the right word from the table.' They should just enter a letter, A to E, in each textbox, G1 to G5. The email sent by php then contains 5 empty lines, n, where the answers should be.

Because students often press enter in strange places, I run a Python script to get rid of empty lines in the emails after downloading.

So I would like to get php to put say X if a textbox is empty, before it sends the email.

The first part of the thankyou.php looks like this:

//should mail the contact form

<?php

$studentnr = $_POST['sn'];

$q1 = $_POST['G1'];

$q2 = $_POST['G2'];

$q3 = $_POST['G3'];

$q4 = $_POST['G4'];

$q5 = $_POST['G5'];

What I would like to do in php is something along the lines of:

for i in range(1, 6):  

    answer = $q + str(i)  

    if answer = '':  

        answer = 'X'

but that would be Python. What is the right way to do this in php?

I think this should be done after collecting all the $qs in the php script, but before making the body of the email:

$body = "



Studentnr = ".$studentnr."

".$q1."

".$q2."

".$q3."

".$q4."

".$q5."

";

Very grateful for any tips!

Edit: this is an actual thankyou.php with the loop to change '' for X, but all I get now in the email is: Studentnr = 1725010999, nothing else. How to tweak this? I just entered the student number and left all other boxes empty, so I was expecting a lot of Xs. I am not getting any errors in the error log of my php directory on the webpage host. Maybe a ; missing somewhere?

//should mail the contact form

<?php

$studentnr = $_POST['sn'];

$q1 = $_POST['G1'];

$q2 = $_POST['G2'];

$q3 = $_POST['G3'];

$q4 = $_POST['G4'];

$q5 = $_POST['G5'];

$q6 = $_POST['G6'];

$q7 = $_POST['G7'];

$q8 = $_POST['G8'];

$q9 = $_POST['G9'];

$q10 = $_POST['G10'];

$q11 = $_POST['G11'];

$q12 = $_POST['G12'];

$q13 = $_POST['G13'];

$q14 = $_POST['G14'];

$q15 = $_POST['G15'];

$q16 = $_POST['G16'];

$q17 = $_POST['G17'];

$q18 = $_POST['G18'];



for ($i=1; $i <= 18; $i++) {

    if (${"q$i"} == '') ${"q$i"} = 'X';        

}



$body = "



Studentnr = ".$studentnr."

".$q1."

".$q2."

".$q3."

".$q4."

".$q5."

".$q6."

".$q7."

".$q8."

".$q9."

".$q10."

".$q11."

".$q12."

".$q13."

".$q14."

".$q15."

".$q16."

".$q17."

".$q18."

";





$to1 = "myemail@foxmail.com";



$subject = $studentnr . "sWeek1";

$headers = "From: peter@mypage.comrn";

$headers .= 'Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8';



mail($to1, $subject, $body, $headers);



header("Location: email_success.php");



?>

Any more tips please?

You can do that like this:

   for($i=1; $i <= 5; $i++) {

        $answer= ${'q' . $i};

        if($answer=='') $answer='X';        

    }

Edit:
If you just only need to update value, you can do that like this,

   for($i=1; $i <= 5; $i++) {

        if(${'q' . $i}=='') ${'q' . $i}='X';        

    }

If you want to change any of the $q* variables to 'X' if they are empty, you can use PHPs variable variables to do that. For example:

$q1 = '';

$q2 = 'A';

$q3 = '';

$q4 = 'E';

$q5 = 'D';

for ($i=1; $i <= 5; $i++) {

    if (${"q$i"} == '') ${"q$i"} = 'X';        

}

echo "$q1n";

echo "$q2n";

echo "$q3n";

echo "$q4n";

echo "$q5n";

Output:

X

A

X

E

D

Demo on 3v4l.org