PHP - How to send an array to another page?

Solution 1:

You could put it in the session:

session_start();
$_SESSION['array_name'] = $array_name;

Or if you want to send it via a form you can serialize it:

<input type='hidden' name='input_name' value="<?php echo htmlentities(serialize($array_name)); ?>" />

$passed_array = unserialize($_POST['input_name']);

The session has the advantage that the client doesn't see it (therefore can't tamper with it) and it's faster if the array is large. The disadvantage is it could get confused if the user has multiple tabs open.

Edit: a lot of answers are suggesting using name="input_name[]". This won't work in the general case - it would need to be modified to support associative arrays, and modified a lot to support multidimensional arrays (icky!). Much better to stick to serialize.

Solution 2:

You could serialize the array, which turns it into a string, and then unserialize it afterwards, which turns it back into an array. Like this:

<input type='hidden' name='input_name' value='<?php serialize($array_name); ?>' />

and on page 2:

<?php $passed_array = unserialize($_POST['input_name']); ?>

Solution 3:

I ran into some issues with the above examples when some values in my array contained line breaks. Some of my values also had characters from foreign languages which htmlentities kept screwing up. The following was my solution.

In the page that you want to pass the array from...

<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="input_name" VALUE="<?= base64_encode(serialize($array_name)); ?>">

In the page that receives the array...

$array = unserialize(base64_decode($_POST["input_name"]));