Is it possible to have a HTML SELECT/OPTION value as NULL using PHP?

Question

The following is a snippet from my HTML form which pulls the options from the table rows accordingly.

What I want to do is have the first option value to be NULL so when no choice is made, NULL is entered when the form is submitted to the database.

    <td>Type</td>     <td>:</td>     <td><select name="type_id" id="type_id" class="form">     <option value=""></option>         <?php              $sql = mysql_query("SELECT type_id, type FROM $tbl_add_type") or die(mysql_error());             while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($sql))                 {                     echo "<option value=".$row['type_id'].">" . $row['type'] . "</option>";                 }         ?>     </select>*</td> 

Is this possible? Or could someone suggest an easier/better way of doing this?

Thanks

Update: Thanks for the answer, I'm using the method detailed below to convert it to NULL.

if ($_POST['location_id'] === '')                     {                         $_POST['location_id'] = 'NULL';                     } 

However when trying to use this NULL value with the following query it does not work.

UPDATE addresses SET location_id='NULL' WHERE ipid = '4791' 

I know it needs to be location_id=NULL instead but don't know how to do this...

Update 2: this is how my queries work:

if ($_POST['location_id'] === '') { $_POST['location_id'] = 'NULL'; // or 'NULL' for SQL }  $notes=isset($_POST['notes']) ? mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['notes']) : ''; //$location_id=isset($_POST['location_id']) ? mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['location_id']) : ''; $ipid=isset($_POST['ipid']) ? mysql_real_escape_string($_POST['ipid']) : '';   $sql="UPDATE addresses      SET notes='$notes', location_id='$location_id'     WHERE ipid = '$ipid'";   mysql_query($sql) or die(mysql_error()); 

Answer 1

No, POST/GET values are never null. The best they can be is an empty string, which you can convert to null/'NULL'.

if ($_POST['value'] === '') {     $_POST['value'] = null; // or 'NULL' for SQL } 

Answer 2

All you need is a check on the post side of things.

if(empty($_REQUEST['type_id']) && $_REQUEST['type_id'] != 0)     $_REQUEST['type_id'] = null;