forms that look like grids -- are values correlated?

[Chris Curvey]

I have a form like this, which looks like a grid of entries.

<form method="get" action="/dosomething>
<table>
<tr>
<td><input type="text" name="foo" value="1"></td>
<td><input type="text" name="bar" value="3"></td>
</tr>

<tr>
<td><input type="text" name="foo" value="2"></td>
<td><input type="text" name="bar" value="4"></td>
</tr>
</table>
</form>

now if I submit that form the resulting URL looks like

/dosomething?foo =1&bar=3&foo=2& bar=4

so, my question is: are the values guaranteed to be correlated? that
is, can I assume that the the first entries for foo & bar (1&3) go
"together" and the second entries (2&4) "go together"?

(or perhaps a better questions is, "What are the rules (if any) for
multiple fields with the same name, and do they vary by browser?)

[Jukka K. Korpela]

Re: forms that look like grids -- are values correlated?

Scripsit Adrienne Boswell:

What I get on the server is an array containing the values,eg:
foo = a, b, c, d

Perhaps, but that's external to both HTML and HTTP. It is a matter of
the server-side interface between incoming HTTP data and your scripting
environment.

You might have a problem there with some forms and some data, so you may
need to check, from suitable documentation, how the interface handles
a) fields with empty values, such as
foo=
(does it generate an element in the array, just with empty content?)
b) identical fields, e.g.
foo=a
foo=a
(does it generate two elements or just one element the array? The latter
would mean loosing some information, though this might be quite
acceptable and even desirable - it really depends)

--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/