adding troubles revisited

hi everyone. please bear with me as i am trying to troubleshoot this problem to the best of my abilities ... as it stands, i can create both databases and tables remotely using php scripts *read as i can do it from a web browser client*. connecting to the database and displaying output is also troublefree. however, whenever i try to add data to the tables, i either get blank entries or absolutely nothing. the following script ... <html> <body> <? php mysql_connect("localhost", "test", "testpw"); mysql_select_db("testdb"); mysql_query("insert into firsttab (first_name, last_name) values ('$first_name', '$last_name')"); print ($first_name); print (" "); print ($last_name); print ("<p>"); print ("blah blah blah"); ?> </body> </html> with the appropriate mysql_error() statement gave the following error msg: string(35) "insert into firsttab values(","); any help is greatly appreciated at this point. cin