Pre-Select Menu Item

Anon

Hi:

PHP-newbie here 🙂

I have a select box , with states/provinces names, that is being populated dynamically from a mySQL DB. It works fine.

What I'd like to do is to have the desired option "selected". So for example, if the user is from Texas, Texas gets selected. If from Ohio, Ohio gets selected.......

Please help! I did try an IF statement, but kept on getting an error message!

Thanx in advance.

Kamy

Anon

how will you know what state the user is from?

Anon

Hi:

Depending on the country the user has pre-selected they get the proper state/province.

I'm using the code below to generate the selection box.
It all works fine, except for the "Selected" part.....

include_once "common.inc";
$CountryCode = "$Country";
$result = mysql_query("select * from provinces where CY='$CountryCode'");
while ($query_data = mysql_fetch_row($result))
{
echo "<option value=";
echo $query_data[2];
echo ">";
echo $query_data[1];
echo "</option>";

Anon

I still don't see how you will know which state to preselect. Let's say I select USA as my country, how do you know i'm from New York?

kamy99

In the main table that info is coming from there's a reference to the state. It's variable name is "$ST".

I was trying an if staement like this:

if ($ST == $ST)
{
echo "selected";
}

But that writes selected for all states.

Anon

because $ST will always equal $ST. It the same thing as writing "if 4=4", it will always return true. I don't quite understand the flow of your script but anyway if you already have the users state and you are providing a list of states to choose from (perhaps to allow users to update the address) then you could do this:

[assume that $state_array is a array with all 50 states (perhaps being pulled from a database)]

$state = 'New York';

<select name=state>
<?
foreach ($state_array as $value) {
echo "<option>$value"; if ($value == $state) {echo ' selected';}
}
?>
</select>

Anon

whoops, wrong code try this:

<select name=state>
<?
foreach ($state_array as $value) {
echo '<option'; if ($value == $state) {echo ' selected';} echo ">$value";
}
?>
</select>