I think it has become a well adopted standard to use the [] in the names to specify an array or list.  I can't think of a browser or language that does not support this.

The HTML 4 and XHTML standards in fact do support the [] 
characters in input field names.

See:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/interact/forms.html#h-17.4 for 
HTML 4.01

and

http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml-modularization/
abstract_modules.html#s_extfor for XHTML 1.1

That's not correct for id and name attributes. Those attributes are specified as CDATA, but in the CDATA description, you'll see that it spesifically imposes restraints on the id and name attributes.

From the spesifications:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-cdata

"For some HTML 4 attributes with CDATA attribute values, the specification imposes further constraints on the set of legal values for the attribute that may not be expressed by the DTD"

Further down it says:

"ID and NAME tokens must begin with a letter ([A-Za-z]) and may be followed by any number of letters, digits ([0-9]), hyphens ("-"), underscores ("_"), colons (":"), and periods (".")"

Since [] aren't part of the allowed characters, we can't count on the browser to send these characters correctly. Even if most browsers (if not all), supports this, PHP forces people to break standards.

Tough - this won't change

Perhaps two new arrays should be included, like _GETA and _POSTA that will return an array instead of a single value?

No, until such a time that a browser exists where [] doesn't work, I see no reason to change anything.  Standards mean very little on the web.  Most of the web is completely non-standard as it is.

Actually, you don't read the standards very well. I have to admit reading it wrong too, but the standard says: "ID and NAME **tokens**" and the NAME attribute to select or input is an ATTRIBUTE, not a TOKEN.
Now get over it, it's conforming to the standards perfectly.

Derick

No, mail4news@mailme.dk seems to be reading the spec 
correctly. The value of a NAME attribute is a NAME token. 
So, there is currently no standards-compliant way to 
retrieve the values of a SELECT MULTIPLE input of a POST 
form in PHP.

While Rasmus is correct in saying that standards matter 
very little on the web today, I refuse to accept that *
blocking* people from using standards-compliant markup is 
the right way to go for PHP.

This data needs to be available *somehow*. Magic arrays are 
not the right way to go, but one should be able to 
replicate the [] behaviour in a standards-compatible token.

Okie, I'm stoopid and need to learn to read the w3c 
ciphertext