PHP Bug? Problems with arrays

I am a PHP newbie (coming for about a year of PERL development). I wrote this function to determine the rows and values that go into an UPDATE sql statement. Going straight to the point, the problem I am having is that the last "for" loop iterates one more time that is supposed to. The value for $total_columns is 7, but as you can see the array that it is populating has 8 elements. Here is the code snippet. I have to apoligize in advance if this is some sort of obvious logical mistake on my part. It is rather late and I quit drinking coffee long time ago :). ### Begin code #### <? #initialize array with list of columns $column_list = array ("FirstName", "LastName", "MiddleName", "Birthday", "Nationality", "Client", "CountryBirth", "MarineID"); #values for variables $firstname="lolo"; $lastname= "lala"; $middlename=""; $birthday="1974-02-02"; $nationality="martian"; $client="1"; $marineid="23423"; $countrybirth="mars"; #initialize array with list of values $arguments = array ($firstname, $lastname, $middlename, $birthday, $nationality, $client, $countrybirth, $marineid); $total_items = count ($column_list); # get the total number of columns for ($i=0; $i <= $total_items; $i++) { if ($arguments[$i]) #check to see if there is a value for the column { #Determine the type of data in array $values to decided #whether to use quotes or not. $values[$i] = "'". $arguments[$i]. "'"; #add to the list of values $columns[$i] = $column_list[$i];#add to the list of columns } } $total_columns = count($columns); for ($j=0; $j <= $total_columns; $j++) { $set_statement[$j] = "$columns[$j]=$values[$j]"; echo $set_statement[$j] . "<p>"; } echo $total_columns; exit; ?> ### End of code #### _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.