Get value from dropdown after submit in codeigniter - codeigniter

Question

I have dropdown list with some universities and in case the user is in a university that isn't in the list he can add it with an input box. My issue is that after the user clicks the submit button I can't get the value from the dropdown.
My code in the view is:
echo "University:";
?>
<div id="university2" style="display:block;">
<?php
echo form_dropdown('university2',$this->session->userdata('user'));
echo "&nbsp";
echo "<a href= javascript:ShowContentuni('university')>Other</a>";
?>
</div>
<div id="university" style="display:none;">
<?php
echo form_input('university',$this->input->post('university'));?>
</div>
And my code in the controller is:
if(isset($_POST['university']))$university= $this->input->post['university'];
else if(isset($_POST['university2']))$university=$this->input->post('university2');
Any ideas what I'm doing wrong??

Answer 1

It looks like there are two problems:
always overriding the value of $university with the post value of 'university2', even if it is empty
the form has two inputs called university, only the second one is being referred to
A quick fix would be to first delete the second 'university' form element, i.e. delete this:
echo form_input('university',$this->input->post('university'));
Then check that the user if the user has manually entered a university name, and use that if so. If the user did not enter a university name, use whatever the dropdown value is. The code would look like this:
$universityFromDropdown = $this->input->post('university');
$universityFromManualInput = $this->input->post('university2');
$university = is_string($universityFromManualInput)
&& strlen($universityFromManualInput) > 1
? $universityFromManualInput : $universityFromDropdown;