There will come a time when you, as a web designer, will have to construct a HTML form with a place to enter the visitor's country of residence in. Now, I think, that an important rule of forms is to limit the amount of information that a visitor has to enter manually, to avoid mistakes and multiple variations of the same answer(s).

A classic example is when looking for the gender of a person- having a drop-down select menu with option 'female' and option 'male' avoids any variations in spelling (case of text or language) as well as actual spelling errors.

On a simple mailing form, this usually doesn't cause any issues, as a human will probably be interpreting the answers, but if you're entering the data in to a database, it'll make life very awkward trying to sort by gender or in the case of this blog post, country of residence.

I've been working on a booking form where the country of residence is important, and previously I had a long list of countries formatted like <option value="country name">Country Name</option> which I inserted whenever needed. However, once I needed to have some if/else statements in place to re-select the visitor-selected country, when the form bounced back with errors (for example, missing fields or invalid email address), I had to rethink this strategy.

Disclaimer

Before I go any further, let me state that I am not a PHP expert but I think this is fairly simple PHP that shouldn't cause any problems.

I started off by creating a PHP include file with an array of countries in it. I have zipped this file and you can download it here to take a look. Then, whenever I need to include a country list on a form, I simply include the country list file before running through a simple loop of the array. Here is an example of how I would use it-

<label for="country">Country:</label>

<select name="country" id="country">

<?php include ('countrylist.inc.php'); //include the country list file

//start loop

foreach ($countrylist as $row){ ?>

<option value="<?php echo $row; ?>"

<?php

// Enter your if/else statement here to set 'selected="selected"' if throwing errors

?>

>

<?php echo $row; ?>

</option>

<?php } ?>

</select>

Easy!

Pretty basic PHP 101 stuff and this blog post is definitely not aimed at back-end coders/developers. Forms, whether linked to database data or a simple mailing form, is one area that is often handled by front-end coders and designers, and there is no need to languish doing incredibly repetitive stuff with a couple of hundred country entries when an array, looped through with PHP (or similar language) means that you only have to worry about a single <option> than hundreds of them. 

I hope this helps, the country list can be downloaded here. I'm offering this as-is with no promise of support of its use. Sorry, I won't be able to provide tech support for it, but might I suggest this book (under a shameless Amazon Associates link) PHP Solutions by David Powers. It's a great book and will run through PHP from the ground up.