Re: selecting current month from a database

At 11:45 PM 5/20/2006, Paul Goepfert wrote:

I have a drop down menu where I have the months of year as menu items. I want to be able to have the current month be the selected month. I have tried using the date function as the way to set the current month as the selected value but it seems that every value entered in the select box is set to selected. Here is my code maybe someone can help me out $month_query = mysql_query("SELECT m_id, months FROM Month");

        while ($r = mysql_fetch_array($month_query))
        {
                $v = $r["m_id"];
                $out = $r["months"];
                echo("<option  selected=" . date("F") . "value=$v>$out</option>\n");
        }

Just incase you want to know m_id = 1..12 months = January..December How do I set only the current month to selected ?

Paul, The syntax for pre-selected options is:

HTML:  <option selected>            [1]

XHTML: <option selected="selected"> [2] Options that are not pre-selected simply omit the selected attribute altogether. Therefore you'll want code something like this:

        while ($r = mysql_fetch_array($month_query))
        {
                $v = $r["m_id"];        // numeric month
                $out = $r["months"];    // verbal month

                        // select option for current month
                        if ($v == date("n"))
                        {
                                $selected = 'selected="selected"';
                        }else{
                                $selected = '';
                        }

                echo "<option $selected value="$v">$out</option>\n";
        }

Notes: - date("F") is the verbal month; date("n") is numeric [3]. Therefore you'll want to compare $v with date("n") or $out with date("F"). - Adhering to XHTML syntax, I've put the attribute values in quotes. [2] - FYI, you can harmlessly include parentheses in the echo statement but echo is actually not a function and doesn't require parens [4]. Regards, Paul ________________________ [1] W3C HTML 4.01 Specification 17 Forms 17.6.1 Pre-selected options http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/interact/forms.html#h-17.6.1 [2] XHTML™ 1.0 The Extensible HyperText Markup Language (Second Edition) 4. Differences with HTML 4 4.4. Attribute values must always be quoted http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/#h-4.4 [3] PHP Manual VI. Function Reference CLI. String Functions echo http://php.net/echo [4] PHP Manual VI. Function Reference XXII. Date and Time Functions date http://php.net/date