Any way to define selected inside <select> tag rather than on

Answer 1

You could always just write a helper function that gives you the by passing it parameters. Something along the lines of

function get_option($value, $selected_value) {
    return '' . $value . "\n";
}

This will keep you from having to write it for each value, but instead just do

$selected_value = '4ft 5in - 134cm';
echo get_option('4ft 5in - 134cm', $selected_value);
echo get_option('4ft 6in - 137cm', $selected_value);
//etc, etc