Question

I am trying to write a for loop in PHP to add to an HTML <select> tag dropdown, that allows people to pick their birth month.

Heres my code which isn’t working:

<p>
    <label for="signup_birth_month">Birthday:</label>
    <select name="signup_birth_month" id="signup_birth_month">
        <option value="">Select Month</option>
        <?php for ($i = 1; $i <= 12; $i++){
            $month_name = date('F', mktime(0, 0, 0, $i, 1, 2011));
            echo '<option value="'.$month_name.'"'.$month_name.'></option>';
        }?>
    </select>
</p>

How do I write a for loop that returns the name of each month in year?

Answer 1

You need to quote the value key with:

echo "<option value=\"" . $month_name . "\">" . $month_name . "</option>";

In addition, I’d probably prefer something like this:

$months = array("Jan", "Feb", "Mar", ..., "Dec");
foreach ($months as $month) {
    echo "<option value=\"" . $month . "\">" . $month . "</option>";
}

It seems bizarre that you would make all those unnecessary calls to date and mktime when you know what the values should be.

This array version has the same number of lines and it seems a lot clearer in intent (at least to me).