What exactly does putting enctype="multipart/form-data" in the form tag do? I know that you must have it to make a file upload form work, but why?

[Jeff]

It tells your browser to encode the POST data as multipart/form-data, which is code for 'there's a couple parts, and one of them may be something besides a simple text field, so encode it accordingly'.

Without that, you'd get it sent as a URL-encoded list of variable/value pairs (&var=value), which makes transferring a file kinda tough...

[Silver_S]

enctype="multipart/form-data" let you upload files with PHP, like JPG files, DOC files, etc......

[tiran]

I can't tell you how many times I have forgot to put that and banged my head against the wall for 15 - 20 mins before I realized the omission.

[Secret]

^ Same here....