Best way to build a date editing page

I can’t help but feel that I’m doing this the hard way.

Every time I build a page with a date editing form, I need to read the form from the db, then painfully build a long list of variables, pulling each attribute I want from the database and creating a variable, such as;

[code=php]$address=$row[‘address’];
$city=$row[‘city’];
$provstate=$row[‘provstate’];
$postal=$row[‘postal’]; [/code]

I suppose I could just use the $row[‘attribute’] directly in my form code to populate the form with the pre-existing data, but I find the [COLOR=”DarkRed”]“His name is “.$row[‘hisname’].” and always has been.”[/COLOR] notation harder to follow compared to [COLOR=”DarkRed”]“his name is $hisname and always has been.”[/COLOR]

My other idea, Plan B, is to do something like this (haven’t tried it yet, code probably doesn’t work as is), which seems easier to build and easier to modify if I add or drop fields to work with;

[code=php]
$fieldlist = array (“address”, “city”, “provstate”, “postal”);
foreach ($fieldlist as $temp) {
$$temp = $row[‘$temp’].”;”
} [/code]

Of course I can use the same $fieldlist array when building the insert statement.

Does plan B make more sense? Or am I being dense and overlooking a much more reasonable approach?

What do most people do?

(using PHP 5.x and MySQL 5.x)

Also in #PHP _↴