suppose you have a web form, and you want to make sure that the user enters or submits atleast a certain amount of character before the form can be validated, lets say for example you have a contact us form and you want the user's name to have atleast 3 or more character in their name, if it has less, than the form will reject and tell the visitor to try again.

I have the same question, but the solution is simple, thanks for the support of the folks at www.webune.com i was able to get this question answer. I do all my web hosting with webune and I am very pleased with their service. The tech at webune said i can do this with PHP. Since i have all my hosting with them, php is standard in all their packages.

so the funtion to use in php to limit the least amount of character a user can enter is the strlen() function.

ok, to follow the contact us form example for the user's name, so once the user submits their name, i would use something like this to check the form to make sure the user's name in 3 or more character long otherwise, the form will fail, so this is the html i would use:


CODE:


<!-- #####  BEGIN HTML CODE  ##### -->

<form method="post" action="this_file.php">
  <p>Name:
    <input type="textfield" name="name">
</p>
  <p>
    <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit">
</p>
</form>

<!-- #####  BEGIN HTML CODE  ##### -->

<?
######  PHP CODE BEGIN #########

f(strlen($_POST[name]) > 3)
         {
            echo "Your Name is Valid";
         }
      else
         {
            echo "Sorry, Your name must contain atleast three characters;
         }

######  PHP CODE END #########
?>