How to create a drop-down menu that contains the stocks that has as options?

Question

I'm struggling trying to create the form for this part of the pset. I have a controller (sell.php) and a template form (sell_form.php).

Sell.php receives submission from sell_form.php, delete user 's stock from portfolio table and update user's cash in users table.

The thing is that I don't know how to create a form where the user can select any of the stocks he has. This is what I wrote, which doesn't work. The idea is to iterate through an array containing every stock the user has and display that option in the form, but I don't understand how I can combine php with html tags select and option.

<form action="sell.php" method="post">
    <fieldset>
        <div class="form-group">
            Stock:
            <select name = "stock">
            // stocks is an array passed through render from the controler with the symbol of every stock              
            <?php foreach($stocks as $stock):?>
                    <option value = <?= $stock ?>> </option>            
        </div>
        <?php endforeach ?>
    </fieldset>
</form>

Any help would be really appreciated.

Answer 1

First, for closed tags, if you open a tag, you should close it. I see you're not closing the <select> tag. More information about that tag maybe found here.

Also, you have </div> within the body of your for each loop which means </div> will be there n times where n is the number of iterations that this loop will iterate.

Next, you probably shouldn't be mixing HTML and PHP that way

<option value = <?= $stock ?>> </option>

because, you know, angle brackets within angel brackets is a little bit confusing. Rather, you should probably have something like

print("<option value=\"{$s}\">{$s}</option>");

where $s contains the stock symbol of the current company. Recall that you can access the symbol using something like $row["symbol"].

Hope that helps!