Form Select question....

Anon

This isn't exactly a PHP question, but I am using PHP in a page with a form, and so I thought maybe someone had run into a similar problem.

I have a "select" form control on the page, with "multiple" so that multiple elements can be selected, and the page validates itself, so when it reloads, I want to be able to re-set the default value to whatever the user selected (even if the user selected multiple elements). Does anyone know what I need to put in the "value" field in HTML to get the form to default to having multiple items selected?

Anon

I suggest you collect the multiple select data in an array:

<form>
<select size=5 multiple name="numbers[]">
<option>one
<option>two
<option>three
<option>four
<option>five
</select>
<form>

note the "[]" after the "numbers", this will make and array of multiple submitted values. In your validation code you can do a simple "in_array" check and echo "selected" in each option if that item was previously selected:

<?
echo '
<option'; if (in_array ('one', $numbers)) {echo ' selected';} echo '>one';
?>

Anon

i had the same question and tried devin's advice. it is working well. plus you need to check if $number is an array, in case no item selected, in_array() will give a data type error.

<body>
<form method="post">
<p>
<select name="numbers[]" size="5" multiple>
<option <?php if ((is_array($numbers))&&(in_array("one", $numbers))) { ?> selected <?php } ?>>one</option>
<option <?php if ((is_array($numbers))&&(in_array("two", $numbers))) { ?> selected <?php } ?>>two</option>
<option <?php if ((is_array($numbers))&&(in_array("three", $numbers))) { ?> selected <?php } ?>>three</option>
<option <?php if ((is_array($numbers))&&(in_array("four", $numbers))) { ?> selected <?php } ?>>four</option>
<option <?php if ((is_array($numbers))&&(in_array("five", $numbers))) { ?> selected <?php } ?>>five</option>
</select>
</p>
<p>
<input type="submit" name="Submit" value="Submit">
</p>
</form>
</body>