How do I handle FORMs with multiple form elements (e.g. radio buttons) using the same name?

Answer 1

For radio buttons, the HTML spec assumes that a given group of buttons will have the same NAME and different VALUEs; the browser makes sure that only one button per group name will be selected (at most). So you can just call request.getParameter(“groupname”).

<input type="radio" name="topping" value="cheese" checked>Cheese
<input type="radio" name="topping" value="pepperoni">Pepperoni
<input type="radio" name="topping" value="anchovies">Anchovies

If the user selects “Pepperoni” then request.getParameter(“topping”) will return the string “pepperoni”.
For lists using the FORM tag, multiple values can be returned for the same parameter name. When that can happen, use request.getParameterValues(“param”) which returns a String[] you can iterate through. It’s bad form (so to speak), but you can also duplicate other element types, like

   Name 1: <input type="text" name="name" value="Dick">
   Name 2: <input type="text" name="name" value="Jane">