PHP – Populate Date Dropdowns – HTML Forms
Ok, i’m going to quickly jot down some PHP code, which dynamically populates date fields (dd/mm/yyyy) for HTML forms. I’m always using this code, but I never write it down, so i’m forever retyping it!
To generate the date dropdown fields shown above, you could hardcode the values, like this….
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 | <select name="year"> <option value="1999">1999</option> <option value="2000">2000</option> <option value="2001">2001</option> <option value="2002">2002</option> <option value="2003">2003</option> <option value="2004">2004</option> <option value="2005">2005</option> <option value="2006">2006</option> </select> |
But that’s a very tedious and long way of doing it. A better solution is to use a for loop in PHP to generate the dates. The following code i’m using automatically generates the dates with a few lines of PHP…
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 | <select name="day"> <?for($day=1; $day <= 31; ++$day):?> <? //this code is adding a 0 before all values less than 10 //you don't need this code, but I prefer to have 2 digit values if($day < 10) { $day = "0".$day; } ?> <option value="<?=$day?>"><?=$day?></option> <?endfor;?> </select> <select name="month"> <?for($month=1; $month <= 12; ++$month):?> <? //this code is adding a 0 before all values less than 10 //you don't need this code, but I prefer to have 2 digit values if($month < 10) { $month = "0".$month; } ?> <option value="<?=$month?>"><?=$month?></option> <?endfor;?> </select> <select name="year"> <? //The 60 value here is the amount of years to go back $year = date("Y") - 60; //The 60 value here is the amount of years to go forward //because i went back 60 years, i'm going forward 60 years so the dropdown will always have the current year, going back 60 years. for ($i = 0; $i <= 60; ++$i) { echo "<option>$year</option>"; ++$year; } ?> </select> |
The above code will generate dropdowns for day, month and year! I’ve commented in areas where I felt appropriate.
Does anyone know a better way to do this with PHP? Would love to hear your tips…
brightcherry.co.uk
Hi,
very useful code for populating forms with the date fields.
It has one big disadvantage to prevent it from use professionally:
The number of days for each month are set to 31. In real life they differ in each month. (January = 31, February = 28 or 29, March = 31, April = 30 days etc.)
Would you like to fix that? of course a much more extensive coding needed.
I personally handle this with Javascript, but also that has it’s negative side if someone has Javascript turned off.
Have a good day,
Chris