PHP: Undefined Index - Yet I defined Them ? :S

Hey all, my first time asking on stackoverflow!

Anyway. So this morning (and most of last night) I have been working on an a project of mine. Its a simple small scale e-commerce site.

Not to bog down with the details of the website, I'll skip straight to it.

Basically, I have my website hosted on a webserver with my own domain. In order to submit the work to my University tutors, I have to transfer the files to their web-server. This can only be accessed when connected to the university network and runs under the path http://jawa/handins/...../

Now in order for the MySQL and PHP to function I have to extract the tables and information from my personal phpmyadmin panel and dump it into the phpmyadmin panel provided on the Uni network. The database is called something alot different but the tables are the same, so a small minute to make sure my mysql_connect functions are pointing to the correct database and everything is working fine. Or at least that is the plan..

For some reason my PHP variables (Which WORK on MY server) are now undefined - How? I havent changed a single piece of code except where the database is and that is it:

//form data
                        $firstName = strip_开发者_StackOverflowtags($_POST['firstName']);
                        $lastName = strip_tags($_POST['lastName']);
                        $Email = strip_tags($_POST['Email']);
                        $userName = strip_tags($_POST['userName']);
                        $regPass = strip_tags($_POST['regPass']);
                        $repeatPass = strip_tags($_POST['repeatPass']);
                        $date = date("Y-m-d");
                        $permissions = strip_tags($_POST['permissions']);

Everything matches up with the relevant submit fields. There is nothing different with the code I have running on my personal webserver, and the code hosted on the university network. Yet now these variables you see here are not defined. Forgive me for being stupid if it's obvious, but ive been up for 20hrs straight now and I'm getting really agitated with small problems. However I will not vent my frustration out on anyone, it's not your fault!

Essentially, those variables are used for a registration form. Each sumbit field is given the value which is passed on the $_POST[] function. The form is "POSTING" so no problems there. Im just at a loss!

You probably have a different error_reporting level on your own machine, then it is on the other server. Please add error_reporting(E_ALL); to the top of your page, and these will yell at you.

As @Wesley van Opdorp mentioned, your machine must've a different reporting level, if you set it to E_ALL you will see all errors diplayed such as warnings, notices, and fatal errors.

You have to remember, if you're writing code with the error_reporting turned off or it is set to hide warnings or even notices and everything is working fine, if you turn it on, it may affect your code as it will report every single undefined variable and some other warnings as if it's on strict mode. You may have to add additional checks if that's the case like using isset or is_null before using or referring to undefined variables. Just a thought.

@Wesley is probably right about error reporting.

Try this too though. Check if the input has been entered before trying to use it:

$firstName = isset($_POST['firstName'])?strip_tags($_POST['firstName']):null;

Looks rough I know, but looks it can be as easy as this:

$date = date("Y-m-d");

$inputs = array('firstName', 'lastName', 'Email', 'userName', 'regPass', 'repeatPass', 'permissions');
foreach($inputs as $input)
{
    $values[$input] = isset($_POST[$input])?$_POST[$input]:null;
    //if it was set/used, store it in the variable, if not store null
}

This saves you writing a line for each of the inputs.

So for example $values['firstName'] would have the value of "John" OR null

So when using any of the $values elements check if it's null or use empty() to see if they put in an actual value.