PHP 5 upgrade breaks $do?

[Russell Wallace]

A friend of mine has a set of pages at:

http://ipa.buffalostate.edu/~skablah/7thSea/?do=Hideout

that use PHP; recently the server company upgraded to PHP 5, which
breaks the site; clicking on the Crew, Navigation etc links at the top
left of the above page just brings you back to the main page.

The PHP code is in a file called index.php, it's 200 lines which is
sometimes considered excessive for posting on Usenet, but I can post it
if need be; the relevant code appears to be:

if($do == "Hideout"){ include("home.html"); }
elseif($do == "Crew") {include("characters.htm"); }
elseif($do == "Navigation") {include("story.htm"); }

etc, and it seems that the variable $do isn't being set correctly with
the new version. Anyone have any idea what might be wrong?

(I myself know not one line of PHP, and the author of the site is by his
own admission no expert on it, so quite possibly we're not asking the
right questions; please let me know if we're going about this the wrong
way. I tried Google, but it doesn't appear to accept keywords like $do
that contain punctuation.)

Thanks,

--
"Always look on the bright side of life."
To reply by email, replace no.spam with my last name.

[Chris Hope]

Russell Wallace wrote:

A friend of mine has a set of pages at:

http://ipa.buffalostate.edu/~skablah/7thSea/?do=Hideout

that use PHP; recently the server company upgraded to PHP 5, which
breaks the site; clicking on the Crew, Navigation etc links at the top
left of the above page just brings you back to the main page.

The PHP code is in a file called index.php, it's 200 lines which is
sometimes considered excessive for posting on Usenet, but I can post
it if need be; the relevant code appears to be:

if($do == "Hideout"){ include("home.html"); }
elseif($do == "Crew") {include("characters.htm"); }
elseif($do == "Navigation") {include("story.htm"); }

etc, and it seems that the variable $do isn't being set correctly with
the new version. Anyone have any idea what might be wrong?

(I myself know not one line of PHP, and the author of the site is by
his own admission no expert on it, so quite possibly we're not asking
the right questions; please let me know if we're going about this the
wrong way. I tried Google, but it doesn't appear to accept keywords
like $do that contain punctuation.)

Sounds like register_globals is set to off (which has been the default
since 4.3 IIRC).

You should be accessing external variables like so:
$_GET['do']
$_POST['do']
$_COOKIE['do']

using whichever super global is appropriate.

If you are not able to do this (eg big project with hundreds of pages of
code etc) then you'd need to set register_globals on for that site.

--
Chris Hope | www.electrictoolbox.com | www.linuxcdmall.com

[Russell Wallace]

Chris Hope wrote:

Sounds like register_globals is set to off (which has been the default
since 4.3 IIRC).

You should be accessing external variables like so:
$_GET['do']
$_POST['do']
$_COOKIE['do']

using whichever super global is appropriate.

That worked, thanks!

--
"Always look on the bright side of life."
To reply by email, replace no.spam with my last name.