Re: lynx-dev bug when submitting multiple textareas with same name?

[Doug Yatcilla]

On Mon Jun 19 15:01:53 2000, Klaus Weide wrote:
> On Mon, 19 Jun 2000, Doug Yatcilla wrote:
> 
> > When I submit a form with multiple textarea elements with same name, lynx
> > seems to concatenate all the data from the textarea fields and presents a 
> > single field to a CGI program.
> 
> > I think this is a bug because the hidden, select and textfield elements
> > behave differently than the textarea element.   

...

> I agree that this is a bug.  OTOH, shouldn't the NAME attributes of
> form control elements always be unique (with exception of radio
> buttons)?  Why would anyone want to use a form like this?
> 
>    Klaus

I have a web form that prompts folks to enter a couple of TEXTAREAs worth
of data.  Each TEXTAREA represents an item in a list of items (bibliographic
info, in the case of my form.)  The name of each TEXTAREA element is
"publications".

When I process the form (using Lincoln Stein's CGI.pm package) I can use: 

@list = param('publications');

Each element of the array should now contain one citation.  I just need to
examine the size of the array to learn the number of citations entered on
the form (different people may enter different number of citations.)
This saves me the trouble of making up unique names for each TEXTAREA field
and having to do a lot of work to decide how many have been submitted.

The form has been tested by folks running many different browsers.  Everything
seems to work OK.  I am probably only one who uses lynx, and I am
crestfallen that I will have to redesign the CGI program & form to make it 
compatible with my browser of choice!

Thanks for your help
Doug

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