Country helper problem

[eluser]Gukkie[/eluser]
Hi all, i created my own helper which gets the country list from the database, the thing is everything works fine except that when i post the form and if errors are encountered, the country field does not hold its value, this is my helper code:

Code:

<?php  if (!defined('BASEPATH')) exit('No direct script access allowed');

if(!function_exists('country_dropdown'))
{
function country_dropdown($name='', $selection=NULL, $attributes=array())
{
  $CI =& get_instance();
        $CI->load->database();
  
  // Get values from database
        $sql = "SELECT CountryId, Country FROM countries";
        $query = $CI->db->query($sql);
  
  if(!empty($attributes))
  {
   $output = "<select name='{$name}' {$attributes}>";
  }
  else
  {
   $output = "<select name='{$name}'>";
  }
  
  $selected = NULL;
  
  foreach($query->result_array() as $row)
  {
   $value   = $row['CountryId'];
   $country = $row['Country'];
  
   $country_array = array($value => $country);
  
   foreach($country_array as $key => $value)
   {
    if($key === $selection)
    {
     $selected = "SELECTED";
    }
    $output .= "<option value='{$key}' {$selected}>{$value}</option>";
    $selected = NULL;
   }
  }
  
  $output .= "</select>";
  return $output;
}
}

?&gt;

HTML:
country_dropdown('country', $this->input->post('country'), '');

Any ideas?