Question

I know how to create a drop down list, however if you had to create a form where one of the input is a state (a two letter word) in a drop down list, do I just input the state one by one or should I store the state in a DB?

Answer 1

This is kinda weird question. Depending on your project of course.

If you need performance and speed, when loading your dropdown list (I’m assuming you meant <select />). Then you might want to put them into a separate .php file in an array form. So later on you could just loop them with foreach(). This method will surely load faster, then to load 50 states from DB.

inc-states.php:

$states = array(
    1 => 'Alabama',
    2 => 'Indiana',
    3 => 'Nevada'
    // etc..
);

Generate form:

echo '<select name="states">';
foreach ($states as $key => $state) {
    echo '<option value="' . $key . '">' . $state . '</option>';
}
echo '</select>';

So after posting you will only save the keys. Later on you can again get the right state via the key:

include('inc-states.php')

$user['state'] = 2; // Lets make a default for this example

print $states[$user['state']]; // outputs Indiana

Same basic idea remains with the DB method as well. Only this is probably faster.. Unless of course you want to be able to edit the states via some sort of admin console.

NOTE: You in fact said two character shortcodes only, but my example array looks prettier with full titles. Anyways, as you probably know, you can put the states in whatever format in the array.