PHP: Drop Down List with Select

by Yang Yang on February 8, 2009

in CSS & HTML Tips, PHP Tips & Tutorials

Populating a drop down list control <select> from a php array is easy, the following function would do it with a breeze. Assuming an array of IT companies:

$companies = array(
	'Microsoft' => 1,
	'Google' => 2,
	'Apple' => 3
);

Feed it as a parameter to the php function below:

function generateSelect($name = '', $options = array()) {
	$html = '<select name="'.$name.'">';
	foreach ($options as $option => $value) {
		$html .= '<option value='.$value.'>'.$option.'</option>';
	}
	$html .= '</select>';
	return $html;
}

with

$html = generateSelect('company', $companies);

you will get an HTML form select control as following:

<select name="company">
	<option value="1">Microsoft</option>
	<option value="2">Google</option>
	<option value="3">Apple</option>
</select>

With data selected from SQL database, you will first convert the SQL results rows to php array and then use it with the generateSelect() function to generate HTML select control drop down list.

{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }

William August 25, 2009 at 11:48 pm

I get that; however, when you use mysql to read the info in the drop-down box, how to mark as selected without hardcoding something directly into html?