php forms and itself

heiya, been trying to code a page that execute itself, whereby a user typed in a textarea and when the button execute is press, php script is run. i somehow got it to execute but the value $textQuery is not recognised, i mean it

display errors:
Notice: Undefined index: textQuery in ..../index2.php on line 56.

please help me out asap. thanks in advance

Heres the coding:

<td width="504" rowspan="2">
<form name="query" method="post" action="index2.php">
<p>Type Query Here:<br></p><textarea name="textQuery" cols=60 rows=10></textarea>
<input name="Clear" type="reset" id="Clear" value="Clear">
<input name="execute" type="submit" id="execute" value="Execute" >
</form></td>
</tr>

<tr><td width="92" rowspan="3">&nbsp;</td></tr>
<tr>
<td><p>The Output Result:<br></p>

<?php
$gg = $_POST['textQuery'];
if($gg==null){
echo "hello world"; }
else { oraQuery($gg); }
?>


</td>
</tr>
</table>

I want to recommend two things...
[1] try using isset() instead of ==null
[2] instead of executing your function, try a simple print statement...

both of these will help discover if the problem is with the function, or the variable being set

I forgot to mention, you might want to use $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] instead of hardcoding the filename [when you submit to yourself].

The problem is that $_POST['textQuery'] is only defined when this script is executed as the result of a form action. The first time you load the page, it's undefined. You should protect that code with something like

to make sure you got here as the result of clicking the submit button.