Quotes not quite right!

[stevegingercat]

Hi ya!

I'm building a drop down menu to select "cats" categories

it's working except that the "cats" that have / contain multi words are printing out like this - 

 

<select name="site_search">
 <option value="Pen" case="">Pen Case</option>
  <option value="news">news</option>
  <option value="List" of="" names="">List of names</option>
  <option value="Library">Library</option>
</select>

 

This is the mysql and php that I'm using to create the above

 

$result = mysqli_query($conn,"select distinct cats from URLS order by cats desc");
$total = mysqli_num_rows($result);
while ($myrow = mysqli_fetch_array($result))

{
echo "<option value=".$myrow["cats"].">".$myrow["cats"]."</option>";

}

echo "</select>";

 

Server Version

mysql  Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.3.34-MariaDB, for debian-linux-gnueabihf (armv8l) using readline 5.2

 

Any thoughts with regard the above?
TIA

 

Steve

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[maxxd]

This is one of the major problems with echoing html from within php - your quotation marks are getting lost/confused. If you have to do this, remember using single quotes is perfectly appropriate for an echo statement in php even though it won't interpolate variables. In your case, this is fine as you're using concatenation. Try this:

echo '<option value="'.$myrow['cats'].'">'.$myrow['cats'].'</option>';

This way it's easier to see that there are quotes around the option value so you know that spaces in the value won't break the entire thing (which is what's happening to you now).

It's also a best practice in html to use double quotes for attribute values, so that's cool too. I made the quotes around the array indexes single quotes; I'm not entirely sure that's best practice for php but it's what I've seen most often and what I personally prefer, so...

[stevegingercat]

Beautiful! 

Thanks so much for that!
It Works 

Cheers!

[maxxd]

Groovy - I'm genuinely glad that works and helped you out. Now for bonus points, can you explain why it works?

[phppup]

@maxxd  it works because the ECHO is 'printing' the HTML commands that are to be used.  In this format, the PHP had to be interrupted by closing the quotes and adding a dot around a non-HTML item, which is a PHP variable, and then reopening the connection if more concatenation is required.

[ginerjm]

Another way of doing this is:

echo "<option value='{$myrow['cats']}'>{$myrow['cats']}</option>";

Use the braces when you have an array value.  Not needed for simple vars such as $x as in :

echo "<option value='$x'>$x</option>";

[Barand]

Beware when enclosing a string attribute value with single quotes.

If

$myrow['cats'] = "O'Reilly books;
echo "<option value='{$myrow['cat']}'>{$myrow['cat']}</option>";

then the generated HTML will be

And the submitted GET value...

Instead,

echo "<option value=\"{$myrow['cat']}\">{$myrow['cat']}</option>";

->

[ginerjm]

I have no difficulty getting that line of code to work with the value of O'Reilly.  How the script handles a value like that when selected is perhaps another issue but getting it to display properly with my offering is not a problem.

[Barand]

I know the <select> dropdown looks fine and the options display correctly but view the page source code. The problem comes when the form is submitted and the value is wrong.

[ginerjm]

I see now what you are pointing out.  But - should the situation ever involve values having double quotes in them, unlike O'Reilly, there's gonna be a problem then.  As I said earlier we can manage to output it ok, it's just the input processing that's the issue in either case.

[mac_gyver]

the issue of any external, unknown, dynamic value being output on a web page, possibly containing html special characters that would break the html syntax, should be handled by applying htmlentities, with the ENT_QUOTES flag, to value when it is output. this will  allow any single-quote, double-quote, <, >, or & in the actual value to work. they will be converted, by the browser, back to the actual literal character when the value is submitted.

[maxxd]

I initially went with concatenation because best practices in HTML recommend using double quotes for attribute values so far as I recall. All that having been said, obviously this becomes much easier using a template framework like Twig or Blade.

<option value="{{ $myrow['cats'] }}">{{ $myrow['cats'] }}</option>

Not only that, both escape output by default.