PHP, HTML and Javascript problem with Select drop down

[etymole]

Hi.

 

Sorry if I'm posting in the wrong forum. My problem spans all three types.

I'm working as an intern at a web development company and am trying to create a select box to contribute to filtering a table by country based on the country selected, but without submitting, so I guess I need a bit of javascript to do this.

 

I have a <select> drop down menu that is pulling information from a spreadsheet (created by the company).

I have that working, but now what I want to do is pull the value of the currently selected item (country) out and place it in a variable so that I can run a compare with all of the current 'user' countries that match the selected country.

 

I apologise if I sound a little confusing. It's really a simple thing I'm trying to do but because I want to do it in real-time I don't want to use a submit and a $Get to get the value passed.

 

I then want to compare the value obtained with an already existing PHP variable(s).

 

I'm afraid I don't have the code as I couldn't take it home.

It looks something like this:

I've used open and closing <?php ?> tags because it makes it easier for me to read instead of using quotation marks and echo's all over the place, sorry if this is bad practice, I hope it's readable.

 

$countries = array(country pulling method) blah blah...
<select id="countries">
foreach($countries as $value) {
<option value="<?php $value ?>" > <?php $value ?></option>
}
</select>

 

Now, to re-iterate, this select box displays all of the countries in the spreadsheet on each line as I want. Can anyone help me get the real-time selected country without the need for a Submit?

 

Appreciate any help

 

Thanks

[Psycho]

You want to use AJAX. There are countless tutorials available and I couldn't explain it adequately in a forum to do it justice.

 

Basically, you will use JS to trigger when a chnage is made to the select list and then "submit" that value using JS to a PHP page. That PHP page can then use the value(s) to run a query, or whatever you want to do, then return results back to the JS calling function. The JS can then do something such as update a table of records based on the currently selected country. All of this happens in real time without having to submit/refresh the page.