<option selected> designation

[aaron_karp]

When I create a drop down menu, often I want the selected Option to be designated by PHP. For exampe, I might create a list of 12 months, and I want the current month to be selected. The way I currently do this is:

<?PHP
$currentmonth = date("n");
?>

<select name=month>
<option <? if($currentmonth == "01") echo "selected"; ?>>January</option>

<option <? if($currentmonth == "02") echo "selected"; ?>>February</option>

......

<option <? if($currentmonth == "12") echo "selected"; ?>>December</option>

</select>

This process gets tedious and excessive after a while. Does anyone know of a better way to do this? I feel like there should be some simple solution that has simply eluded me.

Thanks!

[aaron_karp]

By the way, I've searched for a solution to tihs in the current threads, but haven't been able to find one. Apparently there was a long thread a while back that discussed this, but I couldn't locate the link.

[ahundiak]

define('NL', "\n");
function hs_option($value,$content,$selected = 0)
{
  if ($selected) $sel = ' selected="selected"';
  else           $sel = null;

  return "<option value=\"$value\"$sel>$content</option>\n";
}
$now = time();
function hs_select_month($name,$def = null)
{
  global $now;

  if ($def === null) $def = date('m',$now);

  $months = array(
    'Jan','Feb','Mar','Apr','May','Jun',
    'Jul','Aug','Sep','Oct','Nov','Dec');

  $str = '<select name="' . $name . '">' . NL;

  /* Cycle through */
  $id = 1;
  foreach($months as $month)
  {
    if ($id < 10) $idx = '0' . $id;
    else          $idx =       $id;

if ($idx == $def) $sel = 1;
else              $sel = 0;

$str .= hs_option($idx,$month,$sel);
$id++;
  }

  /* Finish Up */
  $str .= '</select>' . NL;
  return $str;
}

The hs_option makes it easier to build an option element. The hs_select_month builds a month select element. Note that for various reasons, I encode the months as '01', '02'.