Question

How do I retain form values upon submit for a loop?

I’ve got something like this:

<?php
    printf ("<optgroup label=\"CATEGORIES\">");

    foreach ($category as $key => $val) {
    printf ("<option value=\"$key\">$val</option>");
    }
    printf ("</optgroup>");
?>

When hitting submit on another part of my form, it resets the values in the select to the top one. I want it to keep the same value. How? For things like input boxes I have this that works:

<option value="5" name="results" <?php if($_GET["results"] == '5'){  ?> selected="selected" <?php } ?> >5</option>

This works because I’m not dynamically populating the dropdown from a database, so I don’t need a loop to loop through values and populate the select.

Answer 1

printf ("<optgroup label=\"CATEGORIES\">");

foreach ($category as $key => $val) {
  $option = '<option value="' . $key . '"';
  if ($_GET['select_name'] == $key) {
    $option .= ' selected="selected"';
  }
  $option .= ">$val</option>";

  print $option;
}
printf ("</optgroup>");