Extracting form variables when programming in Perl is a real task. The variables can be extracted fairly painlessly using the CGI.pm modules, but there is a lot of work going on under the hood. In PHP form variables just spring to life. If a form has an input statement.

The validation of data that has been entered in a form is necessary in most cases. Why is important? For example, what good is holding a contest or sweepstakes if you can't notify the winner, because he or she entered an invalid telephone number or an incorrect address. What good is having a mailing list if the e-mail addresses on it aren't verified, and your mailing list just bounces back to you without reaching the subscribers and target audience.Validating form entries saves you time and more importantly, it can save you money. And since somebody embossed the slogan "Time is money!", this should be very important for your web site!Well when should we validate? There are two types of validation; client side and server side.For reference, client side means that you are depending on what browser the user is currently using. On the client side, validation is performed using JavaScript. And that can be very tricky, because some users turn off JavaScript support in their browsers before they even come to your site. If you encounter of one those users, client side validation won't help you much if you try to verify data from a form because your JavaScript code will not be executed or interpreted by the browser, means you are back to square 1. Remember, the winner of your competition entered a wrong address.This is where server side validation comes in handy. It will always work, no matter what. Of course assuming that you have access to the technology on your server. Server side validation can be done with Perl, PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, JSP and almost any other scripting language. For this tutorial, I'll use PHP. A quite popular and easy to master server side scripting language.

So the Form Mail we're going to make is going to be broken does into 2 parts. One part has the HTML for the form and the second part is the processing for the form. However, we have to work backwards and do the processing before hand. We will ask three things on the form to keep it simple: their name, their e-mail address, and their comments.

The HTML markup language has build in codes to provide forms. In forms the user can input fields fill out, in text fields of several lines text enter, from lists of entries selects and so forth.If the form is filled out, the user can click on a Button, in order to process the form. The form contains special tags to indicate what happens with the data of the filled out form. For example send the data by E-Mail or process the data with a CGI program on the server.Generally, the major problem is the form validation.

This is an illustration of how to send email through PHP. I did not create a function because I feel mail() is already a wrapper all by itself. I left the first parameter empty because I feel that the "to row" is not any more important than any other row in the header string