Apparently I didn't beat it soundly enough

[drwex]

Thank you to awfief, golux_org, and caulay for helpful suggestions.

The code Just Started Working&tm;. I did use the suggested $_POST notation and eventually that worked. Why it took several iterations of the same thing to work still puzzles me, but it's 1AM and past my bedtime.

(My best guess is that the browser wasn't reloading the new code from disk on page refreshes so I wasn't really running the code I thought I was running. Or maybe I just didn't beat it hard enough when it sneezed.)

Comments

[caulay.livejournal.com]

When testing changes to page code, always remember to clear all caches, including both Apache's and PHP's, as well as your browser's.

Changing the page's file name (and hence its URL) for testing purposes will often show up these sorts of problems.

[drwex]

Yep. Things that aren't always obvious after midnight.

[caulay.livejournal.com]

One very good reason to stop working on this kind of stuff before midnight.

As we often say around the office (usually when a customer gets unreasonable) "It's just a web site, no one's going to die because it's not working."

[drwex]

Indeed. It just happened that I had been out earlier in the evening and was poking at it when I got home.