In PHP, $_POST is a predefined superglobal variable that contains the values of form data submitted via a POST request. This means that $_POST is used to collect values submitted in an HTML form using the POST method.
Here’s an example:
<form method="post" action="process.php"> <input type="text" name="username"> <input type="password" name="password"> <input type="submit" value="Login"> </form>
In this example, we have a simple HTML form that submits username and password data via a POST request to a PHP script called process.php . When the form is submitted, the values of the username and password fields are available in the $_POST array.
In process.php , we can access the form data using $_POST :
$username = $_POST['username']; $password = $_POST['password'];
This code assigns the values of the username and password fields to the $username and $password variables using $_POST.
It is important to note that $_POST can only be used with the POST method in HTML forms. If you are submitting data using the GET method, you should use $_GET instead. Additionally, it’s important to validate and sanitize input data before using it in your code to prevent security vulnerabilities like SQL injection attacks.
Overall, $_POST is an important tool for handling form data in PHP and is commonly used in web development.