title: How do i go about echoing back to a form from a form post action?
body: <p>I have a form containing a textarea for inputing text into. The form also contains a submit button. After pressing the submit button it posts the text within the textarea into my php document. Within my php document the text is added to a database. Once it has been added to the database I would like it to echo back a response telling the user that it has added the text to the database successfully.
  However, if i make it echo that response back to the home page, there is nowhere declared for it to display the echoed message. Has anyone got an idea of what i should be doing in order to get this working? Many Thanks.</p>
  
  <p>Normally i wouldn't use a post straight from the form and i would use ajax and then display the data within a paragraph or something on it's return, however since the form is doing the post it's self i am not sure where to then declare where the response should show up. </p>
  
  <p>The bellow displays my html form code and shows it's action to post to a php file.</p>
  
  <pre><code>           &lt;div id="userban2"&gt;&lt;form id="bannable" action="/onlineusers.php" method="post"&gt;&lt;p&gt; Type username to ban bellow:&lt;/p&gt;
       &lt;textarea name="banned" id="banned" maxlength="255"&gt;&lt;/textarea&gt;&lt;br/&gt;
       &lt;input type="submit" value="Send" class="extrabuttons" onclick="return false; preventDefault();"&gt;
       &lt;div id="cancelban" class="extrabuttons"&gt;&lt;p&gt; cancel&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/div&gt;
       &lt;/form&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>However when in my php file i write ....</p>
  
  <pre><code>    echo "the information has been added to the database successfully";
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>It might send the echo back however it isn't declared to display anywhere how can i change this to make it display the response within my form?</p>
  
  <p>As requested return from my php</p>
  
  <pre><code>if(isset($_POST["banned"])){
             $ban_name = $_POST["banned"]; 
           bannedd($ban_name);
            }
            function bannedd($ban_name) {
           $query1 = mysql_query("INSERT INTO banned_users     (username,firstname,lastname,email,password,ip_address,sign_up_date,last_logged_in,about,sta    rr,userpref)     VALUES('$usernameb','$fnameb','$lnameb','$emailb','$passwordb','$ip_addressb','$sign_up_date    b','$last_logged_inb','$aboutb','$starrb','$userprefb')") or die("Could not insert your     informaion");
            echo "This user has successfully been banned"; 
          }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The form posts what is written in the form due to it having the action and method of post to my php. However should i then have any return i am not sure how i declare where the returned  information should then show (The echoed message).</p>