Showing selected country in a dropdown using PHP

On my page I have a dropdown menu with a list of countrie开发者_开发知识库s, this is a page for users to update their address details so I would like to have the "selected" value when they visit the page set to what the entered upon signup.

I have

<option value="254" >Afghanistan</option><option value="255" >Albania</option>

Etc as my HTML markup and in the database the user's country is stored as the code like in the markup.

Normally this would be simple but as it is such a vast list of countries I can't write php code in each one manually.

Thanks

You tagged the question as MySQL.
The answer is there:

Make a table called countries

Table countries
---------------
id integer auto_increment
name varchar(255)
code char(3)
....

And run a query like

SELECT name FROM countries ORDER BY name

Use the output in your dropdown.

If you are using PHP to create the drop-down, simply insert the "select" test into the loop. (If you aren't, then you might want to - create an array of country vals or get from DB and create the options with a PHP loop.)