highlight multiple options in HTML form

sijis

I have data in my mysql database. i'm trying just to get the selected items highlighted in the selected multiple list in a HTML form. I'm having problems with the if statement to give the "selected" text in the option tag.

 
// i get this var from the mysql database. its stored in SET type.
$country = 1,2,3,4,5;

$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM tblCountryList ORDER BY country_name",$dbServerConn);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
    $country_id = $row['country_id'] ;  

    $country_name = $row['country_name'] ; 
  // problem is here, i'm sure. 
    if ($country_id == $country){
         $sel = " selected";
    }

echo "<option value=\"$country_id\" $sel> $country_name</option>";
}

could you please tell me what i'm doing wrong?

the_Igel

$country = array(1,2,3,4,5);
........
if (in_array($country_id, $country))
.................

sijis

gosh, i tried that!

BUT... the key thing seems to be this.

i defined the variable $sel inside the if() statement, but I never really gave it an initial value, except there. So when I ran the edited code, all the options were highlighted except for the 1st option, but once i added $sel = ""; before the if() statement, it highlighted the correct options. I don't know why that fixed it, but i'll look into it later. 🙂

also, since i don't know what values $country is because i'm getting the data from the db, i did this instead to make the list an array.

$country = explode(",", $country);

so my complete code look like so:

$country = explode(",", $country);
$result = mysql_query("SELECT * FROM tblCountryList ORDER BY country_name",$dbServerConn);
while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
	$country_id = $row['country_id'];  

	$country_name = $row['country_name']; 
	$sel = "";
	if (in_array($country_id, $country)){
		$sel = " selected";
	}

echo "<option value=\"$country_id\" $sel> $country_name | $country_id | $row</option>";
}
echo "</select>";

also thanks. it made me look at things a bit closer.

I knew i wasn't crazy!

the_Igel

Once $sel was set to " selected", it wasn't unset for the rest of options, so all of them appeared selected. As you added setting it to empty string, the problem has gone.