I was making a website where I had to take the Date of Birth from the user . Initially , I took the whole date as a string and passed it to MYSQL through PHP , but then my friend ( Prateek) told me to have a drop down menu for the day, month and the year so as to make it look cool and more user friendly ..
So , then I started to do it and discovered many functions like checkdate() in the process .
The final result : 
This code :
- Displays three drop down menus one each for the day ,month and the year .
- It checks the date for validity using PHP .
- It combines all three (day,month and year) into a MYSQL date format so as to send it to the database
- It will also show by default the option previously selected . eg If there are many fields in your form then the user enters a wrong date ( let it be 29/02/1990) then it will ask you to enter a correct date and also by default select the day as 29 , month as 02 and year as 1990 .
This is being done by $_POST variable of PHP
Here is the code :
<tr>
<td height=”28″>Date of Birth</td>
<td><select name=”Date” size=”1″ >
<?php
$i=1;
while($i<32)
{
if($i==$_POST['Day'])
echo “<option selected value=”.$i.”>”.$i.”</option>”;
else
echo “<option value=”.$i.”>”.$i.”</option>”;
$i++;
}
?>
</select>
<select name=”Month” size=”1″>
<?php
$i=1;
while($i<13)
{
if($i==$_POST['Month'])
echo “<option selected value=”.$i.”>”.$i.”</option>”;
else
echo “<option value=”.$i.”>”.$i.”</option>”;
$i++;
}
?>
</select>
<select name=”year” size=”1″>
<?php
$i=1980;
while($i<2000)
{
if($i==$_POST['year'])
echo “<option selected value=”.$i.”>”.$i.”</option>”;
else
echo “<option value=”.$i.”>”.$i.”</option>”;
$i++;
}
?>
</select></td>
</tr>
And then you can check the date like this :
if(!checkdate($_POST['Month'],$_POST['Day'],$_POST['year']))
{
$error[]=”Please enter a correct date”;
}
Finally , send it to the database :
$date=$_POST['year'].”-”.$_POST['Month'].”-”.$_POST['Date'];
Use this date variable to insert into the database .
PS: If any one has a better way to do it , please leave it as a comment .
