Question

I am working on some form coding in PHP, and I have everything working pretty well when JavaScript is enabled. But from past experience and poor experiences with other sites not doing well when JavaScript is disabled, I thought I would pay more attention to it for this current project.

Regarding input type="text" POST fields, this is not a problem. But for the drop-down I happen to be using, I cannot get it to persist. Well, I can, but then the default selection is not correct. Here is some code…

Basic drop-down structure:

<select id="topic" name="topic">
    <option value="Select an option">Select an option</option>
    <option value="Topic A">Topic A</option>
    <option value="Topic B">Topic B</option>
    <option value="Topic C">Topic C</option>
</select>

I thought maybe if I blended selected with POST data, I could get it to work like this:

<select id="topic" name="topic">
    <option selected="selected" value="Select an option">Select an option</option>
    <option value=""><?php echo $_POST['topic']; ?></option>
    <option value="Topic A">Topic A</option>
    <option value="Topic B">Topic B</option>
    <option value="Topic C">Topic C</option>
</select>

But it doesn’t persist; it only goes back to the default, ‘Select an option’.

Trying this didn’t work either:

<select id="topic" name="topic">
    <option value="Select an option">Select an option</option>
    <option selected="selected" value=""><?php echo $_POST['topic']; ?></option>
    <option value="Topic A">Topic A</option>
    <option value="Topic B">Topic B</option>
    <option value="Topic C">Topic C</option>
</select>

It persists, but doesn’t have the correct default. Starts out blank (because POST is not entered yet).

I have done some Google searches and not really found anything very useful for this kind of thing, so I’m not sure where to go next. Any ideas/suggestions?

Thank you very much in advance!

Answer 1

I normally do something like the following:

<select id="topic" name="topic">
<option value="Select an option">Select an option</option>
<?php
    $topics=Array("Topic A","Topic B","Topic C");
    foreach($topics as $topic){
        echo '<option value="'.$topic.'"'.($_POST['topic']==$topic?' selected="selected"':'').'>'.$topic.'</option>';
    }
?>
</select>

What this does is print out the select box just as you’ve described, but it adds a selected=”selected” attribute to the option that matches your $_POST variable.