note 13631 added to function.mysql-fetch-array.php

actually with php 4.0.5 mysql_fetch_assoc DOES set NULL fields, so you can safely overwrite existing values with $result = mysql_query($some_query); while($row=mysql_fetch_assoc($result)){ extract($row); // ... } extract will do the job of walking through the associative array and setting the variables $$key to $value for you even when $value is NULL mysql_fetch_row also consistently retrieves NULL values with the correct indices Ivan http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-fetch-array.php