title: How to display "SELECT" in dropdown list in Codeigniter?
body: <p>I a have a dropdown list which is being populated from database. It is working fine but in the view file I want the dropdown list to show "SELECT" on the very top of all values. Would you please kindly help me with this?</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in Advance </p>
  
  <p>I have this in my controller</p>
  
  <pre><code> // To get the batch name
  $this-&gt;load-&gt;model('dropdown_batchlist');
  $data['dropdown_batchlist']= $this-&gt;dropdown_batchlist-&gt;dropdown_batchlist();
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>this in my model-</p>
  
  <pre><code>function dropdown_batchlist() {
  $this-&gt;db-&gt;select('batchname, batchid');
  $records=$this-&gt;db-&gt;get('batch');
  
              $data=array();
  
              foreach ($records-&gt;result() as $row)
                  {
                      $data[$row-&gt;batchid] = $row-&gt;batchname;
                  }
  
              return ($data);
          } 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And this in my view file</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?php echo form_dropdown('batchid', $dropdown_batchlist ); ?&gt;
  </code></pre>