$input variable cannot get a two dimensional input form element

[adrianmak]

I have a form with a checkboxes input field, look something like

<input name="choices[1276][]" value="1280" type="checkbox">
<input name="choices[1276][]" value="1285" type="checkbox">
<input name="choices[1276][]" value="1292" type="checkbox">

If I use ordinary PHP fucntion $_POST['choices'], I could get this value.

If I use pw's way $input->post['choices'], i got nothing

I used sizeof to check

sizeof($_POST['choices'])   ->  returned 1 is any of a checkbox is checked

sizeof($input->post['choices'])   ->  returned 0 if a checkbox is checked.

[justb3a]

I can confirm this behaviour. Noticed this some months ago and had to use $_POST for any two dimensional input. 

[cstevensjr]

Does anyone know if there has been an Github issue created for this?  If so, can you please reference in this post?  If not, can you open an issue?

[adrian]

A couple of relevant posts:

https://processwire.com/talk/topic/691-wireinput-only-allows-one-dimensional-arrays-why/

https://processwire.com/talk/topic/7867-input-and-associative-array-issue/

From Ryan:

The main reason it's not there is just because $input is another layer on top of $_POST (or $_GET or $_COOKIE) and I wanted to limit the overhead of it as much as possible, at least until we needed it. Didn't want to enable the possibility of someone posting endless multidimensional arrays from a security standpoint. But ultimately if the need was there, I would add it. And now that its come up, we might as well add it. Probably what I will do is just limit the recursion to 2 or 3 levels to keep it safe. I don't see any potential issues with adding it. If you've had the need for it, then I'm sure others will to. If you want to submit a pull request, I'll bring it into the core. Otherwise, I'll plan to add and commit an update to the core soon.

[kongondo]

Yeah. Probably time to add this to the $input docs.

[tpr]

Is this happening to variables passed to wireRenderFile too? I experienced such an issue but haven't investigate further.

[LostKobrakai]

Afaik wireRenderFile does just do a "extract($vars)" to populate the local variables. There's no need to sanitize or otherwise limit data input.

[tpr]

That shouldn't cause that, thanks. I'll re-check when it happens again but I guess there's something other that interferes.