Question about PHP Arrays syntax

Hello, folks, and I apologize in advance if I break any rules here. This is my first post on this list and I couldn't find any archive to review existing posts for the answer to this question. I'm an advanced HTML/JavaScript/DHTML programmer with relational database experience using FileMaker and Access on IIS with ASP. I finally managed to put that experience together in this last month when I found an inexpensive host with PHP and MySQL support. As a test (http://test.pandorasdream.com), I am building a page with will initially (currently) find all tables in a database and then iterate a TABLE dump of each database table. Next, I plan to add forms to make these tables editable, but that's another ball of wax. Here're my questions: I have the below code working exactly the way I want it to, but it was through some hacking. I want to learn how I SHOULD have done it. a) How would you change the following the automatically find the tables and run through the iteration. I'm new at PHP, and I learn by doing, so forgive me for not doing the RTFM thing, but I just haven't found the answer yet. So instead I created a table called tableNames with one field, which I personally populated with the names of all tables. How should I have done it so that wouldn't be necessary. and b) When I grab the values of the table names using my prepared table tableNames, I couldn't figure out how to get the TEXT value of that record. When I put in a debug statement, all I got was a value of "Array", rather than a name of a table. You'll see below that I hacked a work-around by using a "foreach()" statement, which works flawlessly. How can I grab a specific field of an array without using a foreach()? <?php $hostname = "localhost"; $usernamedb = "margretormaybejoe"; $passworddb = "yeahright"; $dbName = "boohoohaahaa"; $tableNamesTable = "tableNames"; /* Connecting, selecting database */ $link = mysql_connect($hostname, $usernamedb, $passworddb) or die("Could not connect to database host."); print "Connected successfully.<br>\n"; mysql_select_db($dbName) or die("<h1>Error</h1><p>Could not select database.</p>"); /* Performing SQL query */ $queryOfTableNames = "SELECT Name FROM $tableNamesTable"; $resultOfTableNamesTable = mysql_query($queryOfTableNames) or die("<h1>Error</h1><p>Tried Query for all elements of \$tableNamesTable. Query failed.</p>"); while ($tableLine = mysql_fetch_array($resultOfTableNamesTable, MYSQL_ASSOC)) { foreach($tableLine as $tableName) { /* Performing SQL query */ $query = "SELECT * FROM $tableName"; print "<h4>$query.</h4>"; $result = mysql_query($query) or die("<h1>Error</h1><p>Tried Query for all elements of $tableName. Query failed.</p>"); /* Printing results in HTML */ print "<table border=\"1\"">\n"; while ($line = mysql_fetch_array($result, MYSQL_ASSOC)) { print "\t<tr>\n"; foreach ($line as $col_value) { print "\t\t<td>$col_value&nbsp;</td>\n"; } print "\t</tr>\n"; } print "</table><br>&nbsp;\n\n"; /* Free result set */ mysql_free_result($result); } } mysql_free_result($resultOfTableNamesTable); /* Closing connection */ mysql_close($link); ?> Thanks for your help! _________________________ Vania Smrkovski Internet/Interactivity Consultant vania@pandorasdream.com http://pandorasdream.com