How to Pre-Select a Specific Option in a PHP Dropdown Menu?

How to Pre-Select an Option in a Dropdown Menu using PHP

In web development, you may encounter situations where you need to set a default selected item in a dropdown menu based on data pulled from a database. Let's examine how to achieve this using PHP.

Consider the following code, where you have a variable $row['month'] that holds a specific month, and you want to pre-fill a dropdown menu with that month selected:

<code class="html"><select selected="<?php print($row['month']); ?>">
  <option value="January">January</option>
  <option value="February">February</option>
  <option value="March">March</option>
  <option value="April">April</option>
</select></code>

To set the selected item in this scenario, you need to modify the selected attribute of the correct option tag. Instead of using the value from $row['month'], you should set the selected attribute to "selected" if the value matches the current month.

<code class="html"><option value="January" <?=$row['month'] == 'January' ? 'selected="selected"' : '';?>>January</option></code>

Here, we use the ternary operator to check if the current month is 'January,' and if so, we add selected="selected" to the option tag. This ensures that the 'January' option will be pre-selected.

Alternatively, you can create an array of values and loop through that array to generate the dropdown menu options, as shown below:

<code class="php">$months = ['January', 'February', 'March', 'April'];

echo '<select>';
foreach ($months as $month) {
  echo '<option value="' . $month . '" ' . ($month == $row['month'] ? 'selected="selected"' : '') . '>' . $month . '</option>';
}
echo '</select>';</code>

This approach allows for a more dynamic and maintainable method of generating dropdown menus.

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