newbie:restricting users to change data in a textarea

Hi all, I have a app that enables the user to call data out of a mysql database into textareas. They can then edit the data and update the database. There is one field that I whant to stop them from changing. This field I also use in my sql query when updating the table,ie. where variable='$variable'. So what I did was simply this: "<tr>\n"; print "\t<td>$variable</td>\n"; print "</tr>\n"; instead of: print "<textarea name=variable rows=1 cols=10>".stripslashes($row['variable'])."</textarea><br>"; This definately stopped them from editing it but also disabled the mysql query from working. Can anyone just give me a couple of ideas how I can make this work. Thanks Mirco