This paper deals with extremally disconnected spaces and extremally disconnected P-spaces. A space X is said to be extremally disconnected if, for every open subset V of X, the closure of V in X is also an open set. P-spaces are spaces in which the intersection of countably many open sets is an open set. The authors present a new characterization of extremally disconnected spaces, and the extremally disconnected P-spaces, by means of selection theory. If X is either an extremally disconnected space or an extremally disconnected P-space, then the usual theorems of extension of real-valued continuous functions for a dense subset S of X can be deduced from our results. A corollary of our outcomes is that every nondiscrete space X of nonmeasurable cardinality has a dense subset S such that S is not C-embedded in X.