title: Cannot return the values of forms
body: <p>I am new to php and web programming.</p>
  
  <p>I am programming a website that collects essays. In the submission form, I want the date to be entered by 3 select dropdown forms (day-month-year). I used to add them in a text field and save them as strings in database. I added already hundreds of essays so I am not changing the type of data.</p>
  
  <p>I did the following: 
  1- I made a dynamic dropdown using php:</p>
  
  <pre><code>function get_dropdown_options( $name, array $options, $selected=null ) {
  $dropdown = '&lt;select name="'.$name.'" id="'.$name.'"&gt;'."\n";
  $selected = $selected;
      foreach( $options as $key=&gt;$option )
  {
     $select = $selected==$key ? ' selected' : null;
     $dropdown .= '&lt;option value="'.$key.'"'.$select.'&gt;'.$option.'&lt;/option&gt;'."\n";
  }
  
  $dropdown .= '&lt;/select&gt;'."\n";
  return $dropdown; }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>2- then I made a function to show three dropdown menus for days, months and years.</p>
  
  <pre><code>function show_date_dropdown_row($name, $label, $option1, $option2, $option3,  $value = "") {
  
  echo "&lt;tr class=\"".get_row_bg()."\" valign='top'&gt;\n&lt;td&gt;&lt;p class=\"rowtitle\"&gt;".$label."&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/td&gt;\n"; 
    echo "&lt;td&gt;&lt;p&gt;\n";     
    echo get_dropdown_options($name1, $option1, $value1).get_dropdown_options($name2, $option2, $value2).get_dropdown_options($name3, $option3, $value3);
    return $name = $name1." - ".$name2." - ".$name3;
      }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>3- in the submission form page, I put the following code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>show_date_dropdown_row("release_date", "Release Date", $days_list, $months_list, $years_list, "");
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>4- the name "release_date" is then added to the database.</p>
  
  <p>The page shows the three dropdown lists perfectly. But the problem is that the "release_date" in database don't store any value.</p>
  
  <p>I tried the function in step1 and it works perfectly. I know that the problem is in step two, but don't know where.</p>