Using $_POST to get select option value from HTML

I use select as below:

<select name="taskOption">
    <option>First</option>
    <option>Second</option>
    <option>Third</option>
</select>

How do I get the value from the select option and store it into a variable for future use, in PHP?

Use this way:

$selectOption = $_POST['taskOption'];

But it is always better to give values to your <option> tags.

<select name="taskOption">
  <option value="1">First</option>
  <option value="2">Second</option>
  <option value="3">Third</option>
</select>

You can access values in the $_POST array by their key. $_POST is an associative array, so to access taskOption you would use $_POST['taskOption'];.

Make sure to check if it exists in the $_POST array before proceeding though.

<form method="post" action="process.php">
  <select name="taskOption">
    <option value="first">First</option>
    <option value="second">Second</option>
    <option value="third">Third</option>
  </select>
  <input type="submit" value="Submit the form"/>
</form>

process.php

<?php
   $option = isset($_POST['taskOption']) ? $_POST['taskOption'] : false;
   if ($option) {
      echo htmlentities($_POST['taskOption'], ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8");
   } else {
     echo "task option is required";
     exit; 
   }

You can do it like this, too:

<?php
if(isset($_POST['select1'])){
    $select1 = $_POST['select1'];
    switch ($select1) {
        case 'value1':
            echo 'this is value1<br/>';
            break;
        case 'value2':
            echo 'value2<br/>';
            break;
        default:
            # code...
            break;
    }
}
?>


<form action="" method="post">
    <select name="select1">
        <option value="value1">Value 1</option>
        <option value="value2">Value 2</option>
    </select>
    <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Go"/>
</form>

<select name="taskOption">
      <option value="first">First</option>
      <option value="second">Second</option>
      <option value="third">Third</option>
</select>

$var = $_POST['taskOption'];