title: CodeIgniter - Adding a default value to a form_dropdown
body: <p>I'm wondering if someone can help me out.  I have a form_dropdown which I'm filling with options from the database.  I want to add a default "Please Select" value at the top of the list, but can't figure out how to do it without adding that to the database.</p>
  
  <p>My code is as follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>function populatedropdown()
  {
      $query = $this-&gt;db-&gt;query('SELECT * FROM '.$this-&gt;table_name.' WHERE active=1 ORDER BY brand');
      $dropdowns = $query-&gt;result();
  
      foreach($dropdowns as $dropdown) {
          $dropDownList[$dropdown-&gt;brand] = $dropdown-&gt;brand;
      }
      $finalDropDown = $dropDownList;
  
      return $finalDropDown;
  }
  </code></pre>