Dropdown Value from DB Entry

Question

I am capturing a month in my database and the value (integer) is being recorded but when I try to add the selected to the drop down so when the user comes back it reflects the month I can't figure out what I need to set the drop down to reflect the integer value that was previously submitted. If someone can share what i am missing in my selected code I would really appreciate it.

    $months = array(
        1=>'January',
        2=>'February',
        3=>'March',
        4=>'April',
        5=>'May',
        6=>'June',
        7=>'July',
        8=>'August',
        9=>'September',
        10=>'October',
        11=>'November',
        12=>'December'
    );

    $birth_date_month = get_the_author_meta( 'birth_date_month', $user->ID );

    <?php
    foreach ( $months as $num => $month ) {
        printf('<option value="%u">%s</option>', $num, $month, selected( $birth_date_month, $num, false ) );
    }
    ?>

Answer 1

You're not actually outputting the selected attribute into the <option> tag. Look at your printf() format:

'<option value="%u">%s</option>'

%u is there for the month's number value, and %s is there for month's name, but you're not including the last argument from the result of selected().

Your printf() needs to look like this:

printf(
    '<option value="%u" %s>%s</option>', 
    $num, 
    selected( $birth_date_month, $num, false ), 
    $month
);

Note that I swapped the order of the arguments, because selected needs to be output before the month name.