MySQL, PHP: Store form textarea value or data to MySQL database table

5 Comments / PHP Tips & Tutorials, SQL / MySQL Tips and Tutorials / By /

To send the textarea text value in any HTML forms to the web server and store it into a MySQL table by PHP, you will need to POST the textarea data to a PHP script and then the PHP script would connect to a MySQL database to put the data into one of the tables by inserting a record or updating one.

The HTML:

<textarea rows="10" cols="10" name="bio"></textarea>

Now the visitor has finished typing in his text and clicked the submit button. The data is then transmitted via POST method to a PHP script:

$data = $_POST['bio']; // because the name attribute of the textarea tag is 'bio'
$data = mysql_real_escape_string[$data]; // necessary step before using the data string to prevent SQL injection attacks
mysql_query("INSERT INTO `authors` (`bio`) VALUES ('$data')");

By committing the last SQL query, the bio data entered by the visitor is successfully inserted into the table `authors` as a new record. Other than this, you may also want to use: 

UPDATE `authors` SET `bio` = '$data' WHERE ...

To update an existing row with the textarea data instead of inserting a new one.

I think that’s pretty much what the basics look like to put textarea value into a database.

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5 thoughts on “MySQL, PHP: Store form textarea value or data to MySQL database table”

  1. Mat Landers

    For some reason your use of backticks here prompted me to fix the problem I was having. Thanks!

  2. Farrukh Shahzad

    If you dnot want to allow the user to enter the html code in the textarea then you can use the PHP function [ strip_tags() ] to remove the thml tags from the text entered.

    This function will also remove the javascript.

  4. mostak

    the database is not updating but it dont shows any error???////
    help

    <?php
    include("../conn.php");
    $index= $_POST["textarea2"];
    $id = $_POST["textarea1"];
    $name = $_POST["textarea"];

    echo "'$index'";
    echo "'$id'";
    echo "'$name'";
    echo "”;
    $sql = “UPDATE sunhill_first_lease.about_us SET about_us.description = ‘$name’ where about_us.head =’$index’ and about_us.title=’$id’ “;

    result=mysql_db_query(“sunhill_first_lease”,$sql);

    ?>

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