Okay, not the hottest topic in the world of dev, but a common one nonetheless!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let’s say that you’re creating a fun game that lets kids pick their favorite animal and puts a picture of their face on the animal (c’mon, million dollar idea, right).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You’ll start off with a select element with a list of animals to choose from. To populate that select element, you Google “list of animal names”. The first result contains a great list of animal names from A-Z.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, how do you convert that list into HTML <option> tags? There are two approaches here:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Believe it or not, you can use your favorite spreadsheet tool to create the HTML.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you’re familiar with Regular Expressions, you can use your favorite code editor’s find\/replace dialog with it’s regular expression option.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\\R<\/code> in the find box. In most tools, this signifies a line break.<\/li>- Enter
','<\/code> into the replace box (adjust this based on your scripting languages syntax for an array).<\/li>- Once you do the find\/replace, you’ll notice that the list has been converted to a single line, with each option delimited by ‘,’<\/li>
- From there, just add a leading
('<\/code> and trailing ')<\/code> (depending on your languages syntax) and you’ve got your array!<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\nThe Easier Way<\/h3>\n\n\n\n