Insert a .txt document into a select drop down?

Question

I'm not sure if this is the best way of doing this or if it is even possible however what I'm trying to achieve is to echo out all these countries as a list in a select dropdown here is the list Country text document

So my question is how would I display these in a select dropdown or if I can't do this the way I'm trying to do it what would be the best way of doing it without manually adding each country to the form?

<select>
  <option value="GB: United Kingdom">GB: United Kingdom</option>
  <option value="etc">etc</option>
  <option value="etc">etc</option>
  <option value="etc">etc</option>
</select>

Answer 1

A simple example which certainly needs more love:

<?php
$fh = fopen('list.text', 'r');
?>

<select>
<?php
while ($line = fgets($fh, 1024)) {
    echo sprintf('  <option value="%1$s">%1$s</option>'."\n", trim($line));
}
?>
</select>

The output obviously is:

<select>
  <option value="AF:Afghanistan">AF:Afghanistan</option>
  <option value="AX:Åland Islands">AX:Åland Islands</option>
  .....
</select>

Answer 2

Remark: The .txt document mentioned in the question contains the list of world countries. It is a list with fixed content; it doesn't change during the execution of the program, it doesn't change between different executions of the program. It changes sometimes, not very often, when an entry is added or removed from the list. More often, the code or the name of existing items change.

This answer is tailored to the content of the file. It is not a recipe good for all situations.

---

The best way (given the content of the file you want to load) is to have the list of country names indexed by country code in the PHP code, in a separate file.

Something like this (file listCountries.php):

<?php
// ISO-3166 country codes
return array(
    'AF' => 'Afghanistan',
    'AX' => 'Åland Islands',
    'AL' => 'Albania',
    // ...
);
// This is the end of file; there is no need for a PHP close tag

When you need to use it, all you have to do is to write something like this:

$listCountries = include 'listCountries.php`;

Of course, you should put it somewhere in a directory of included files and take care of the path in the include line.

You can then iterate over $listCountries and generate the HTML code you need:

<select>
<?php 
// Assuming the country with code $selectedCode have to be already selected in the list
foreach ($listCountries as $code => $name) {
    $selected = ($code == $selectedCode) ? ' selected="selected"' : '';
    echo('<option value="'.$code.'"'.$selected.'>'.htmlspecialchars($name)."</option>\n");
}
?>
</select>

---

You can generate the file using search and replace in your editor (if it knows search and replace with regular expressions) or you can write a little PHP script to generate the list for you:

$listCountries = array();
$fh = fopen('http://www.textfixer.com/resources/dropdowns/country-list-iso-codes.txt', 'r');
while (! feof($fh)) {
    list($code, $name) = fgetcsv($fh, 0, ':');
    $listCountries[$code] = $name;
}
fclose($fh);

echo("<?php\n");
echo('$listCountries = ');
var_export($listCountries);
echo(";\n");
echo("// That's all, folks!\n");

Run it using the PHP command line and it will dump the PHP code of the list to the output. You can either redirect its output to a file or change it to write the code into a file (the first option is easier).

You can read more about the ISO-3166 country codes on Wikipedia or you can get the up to date information directly from the authoritative source: the ISO.

Answer 3

The short answer is yes it is possible, but is it the best way? No, it isn't, there are many other better ways than plain text storage.

If you ask for advice I would tell you to do it from a DB table or from a JSON, even from a XML.

If you are going to change your mind and use one of these methods I recommend you to google it (You can find the structure that suits your application).

Any way as a guidance I have used these two recently:

• DB Script format
• JSON format

Right now in my case I'm using a JSON format.

To access and populate the select you can use javascript, more in particular JQuery would be handy, like this:

$.getJSON( "test.json", function( data ) {
  var items = [];
  $.each( data, function( key, val ) {
    items.push( "<option value='" + key + "'>" + val + "</option>" );
  });
});  

For further information check the official manual.

If you prefer to populate your dropdown on the server you could do something like this:

$json = file_get_contents('your_json_url');
$countries = json_decode($json);
foreach ($countries as $option){
  echo "<option value='" .$option[key]. "'>" .$option[$value]. "</option>";
}

If you want to do it from your databese the proccess is really similar as long as you also get an array.

If you still want to keep using your .txt format the @arkascha and @axiac answers are totally valid.

Hope this helped you ;)