Dynamic Drop Down menu problem

Square1

Hi All:

I am building a simple dynamic drop down. It is working but not correctly. The field that should should be appearing as the option is not appearing. A number is appearing instead. Checking the source code shows the filed that should be appearing as falling outside the <option>. Maybe I have been looking at this too long!

    <?php

require($_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'] . '/inc/dbconn.php');

if ($result = mysqli_query($link, "SELECT Sport FROM Sports ORDER BY Sport")) {

	echo "<select name='SportCode' size='1'>";
	echo "<option></option>";
    	while ($row = mysqli_fetch_array($result)){

			echo "<option>" . printf($row['Sport']) . "</option>";
		}
	echo "</select>";

mysqli_free_result($result);

}

mysqli_close($link);
?>

And here is the a snippet of source code

    <select name='SportCode' size='1'>
<option></option>
Actor<option>5</option>
Announcer<option>9</option>
</select>

paulnaj

Just need to remove the printf() function call ...

echo "<option>" . $row['Sport'] . "</option>";

Square1

paulnaj;10976894 wrote:
Just need to remove the printf() function call ...
echo "<option>" . $row['Sport'] . "</option>"; 

Now that was easy!

I thought that you needed printf so the variable would appear on the page. I thought lacking a printf is just for processing a variable.

paulnaj

printf() does the same thing as print() and echo(), except it allows you to format the string using various placeholders.

Maybe you are confusing it with sprintf(), which does the same as printf() except it returns a string rather than printing it to output. Hope that makes sense.

Check out printf(), print(), echo and sprintf() in the manual

johanafm

Another difference is that echo returns nothing, print returns 1 (on success) and printf returns the number of printed characters, which is why you get the "weird" output.

The statement

echo 'start ' . printf('stuff') . ' end';

will execute as
printf('stuff') => sends 'stuff' to screen directly.
printf('stuff') returns 5
concatenation of 'start ' . 5 . ' end'
echo 'start 5 end' => is then sent to screen.

resulting in

stuffstart 5 end