03 Sep 2006

Generate a menu with month names

I still see people building their calendar control or month (or day) picker with a hardcoded array of month (or day) names. With the use of strftime you can easily build a locale aware version. Here is an example

<?php
function SelectMonths($name = 'selectMonths', $id = 'selectMonths') {
 $current_month = date('n');

 echo '<select name="' . $name .'" id="' . $id . '">';

for ($i = 1; $i < 13; ++$i) { echo '<option value="' . $i . '"'; if ($i == $current\_month) { echo ' selected'; } $month\_name = strftime('%B', mktime(0, 0, 0, $i, 1, 2006)); echo '>' . $month_name . '</option>';
}

echo '</select>';
}
?>

And now you can easily generate a localized menu

<?php
include('SelectMonths.php');

SelectMonths();

// Tested on a Windows host - Read the http://be.php.net/setlocale
setlocale(LC_TIME, 'dutch');
SelectMonths();
?>

Tim Van Wassenhove

Generate a menu with month names