NYCPHP Meetup

[Joshua S. Freeman]

I've made a conceptual breakthrough (duh!) with regards to this project I'm
working on to really get to a meaningful skill level with MySQL/PHP
development.  But.. for some reason, I'm really stuck on this one point:

I have a database called 'wasps'.  The database has 19 tables so far most of
which are 'lookup' tables (is that the right term?)...

The main table in the database is called 'specimens'.  Each 'specimen' has a
taxonomy (order, family, genus, subgenus, species, subspecies).

For each part of the taxonomy I have a separate table.

Ideally, when someone loads the survey form to begin building a new record
in the 'specimens' table, I want to query those taxonomy tables (order,
family, genus, etc...) so that I can build
<select><option></option></select> menus based on the rows inside each
taxonomic table...

I want to do this using 'foreach'...

I've tried a few different things but I can't get it to work:

mysql_connect($host, $user, $password)
    or die("Could not connect to database");
mysql_select_db($database)
    or die ("Could not select $database database");

print "The current database is $database";

$query= mysql_query("select * FROM order");

$result = $query;
        print ("<select name=\\"order\\">");
        foreach ($result as $key=>$val)
        print "<option value=\\"1\\>$val</option>";
        print ("</select>");
        }

?>

but this does not work.. i know I'm close.. and I just spent 2 hours at
barnes & nobles at a table in the cafe with a bunch of PHP books (couldn't
find that WROX book someone suggested earlier)  trying to make this work on
just the order table because that table only has one record in it...  but I
could not make it work.. if I can figure out how to make this, I'll be able
to make considerable progress on this thing..

Someone please help me over this hump!

Thanks!

J.