I'm having this problem that's driving me nuts.

I've got a MySQL database in which there is a table that contains a text field. I am querying the table in PHP and trying to put the content of the text field for each row into a var.

I am doing something like this:

for ($i=0;$i<$nbrows;$i++){
  $id = $data[$i]['ID'];
  $description = $data[$i]['DESCRIPTION'];
  $mystring .= '<div>'.$id.': '.$description.'</div>';
}

DESCRIPTION is my text field.

I'll pass on the details. The $data array is built from mysql_fetch_array($result). I also tried using objects instead, as I use mysql_fetch_object for all my other routines, but there is no change.

Anyway, the problem is this: if I do "echo $description;" then it works. I am getting my text field data as expected. The problem is that I don't want to output it directly, but add it to a concatenated string, and that is not working. What happens in that case is it seems to be taking $description for some kind of array or object. To make the above example work, I have the replace the string with:

$mystring .= '<div>'.$id.': '.$description[0].'</div>';

So in the concatenated string code, if I treat $description as an array, it works, but obviously I am getting only one letter. (it doesn't actually seem to be an array because I can't implode it).

I tried a million things but I just can't make this work unless I use echo, but that is not what I am trying to do.

There is no issue with fields that aren't text.

Thanks for any ideas!