CodeIgniter: Create checkboxes in form on view so that multiple selections are submitted as an array

Question

I am following nettut+ tutorial for pagination and to store POST inputs as querystrings in db. So far, everything works fine until, suppose if I get an array as POST input, I am unable to loop through it and get all the array values and to store into query_array (i.e., store array within array).

The snippets below:

$query_array = array(
'gender' => $this->input->post('gender'),
'minage' => $this->input->post('minage'),
'maxage' => $this->input->post('maxage'),
'Citizenship' => $this->input->post('citizenship'), // checkboxes with name citizenship[]
);

This returns only last stored array value in Citizenship.

The output array:

Array ( [gender] => 1 [minage] => 18 [maxage] => 24 [Citizenship] => 2 ) 

makes the query string as:

&gender=1&minage=18&maxage=24&Citizenship=2

But, my requirement is to get all the values of 'Citizenship' array instead of last stored value.

The output required to make query string:

Array ( [gender] => 1 [minage] => 18 [maxage] => 24 [Citizenship] => 2 [Citizenship] => 4 [Citizenship] => 6 ) 

The query string :

&gender=1&minage=18&maxage=24&Citizenship[]=2&Citizenship[]=4&Citizenship[]=6

Answer 1

Doesn't look like code ignighter supports un-named multidimensional arrays as input without a bit of hacking.

If you can access raw $_POST data try replacing

$this->input->post('citizenship')

with

array_map('intval',$_POST['citizenship'])

Alternativly add keys to your post data:

&gender=1&minage=18&maxage=24&Citizenship[0]=2&Citizenship[1]=4&Citizenship[2]=6