Array is a good way to store many elements, but in some operations you might like to store all of the elements in a array into different field of a table in a MySQL database. To store into different row, we can use a for loop to go through each elements and run a query to insert them 1 by 1 but insert into different fields is another story. Let me show you how in this example:

First I have created a MySQL table named “atable” with 4 fields named “name”, “address”, “hobby”, “telephone”.

And an array is created here:

<?php 
$arrayOne[0] = "MrX";
$arrayOne[1] = "1234Street";
$arrayOne[2] = "Football";
$arrayOne[3] = "123456";
?>

As your can see, we are going to insert
“MrX” into “name” field,
“1234Street” into “address” field,
“Football” into “hobby” field,
“123456″ into “telephone” field.

In order to do so, we have to know the inserting query:
mysql_query(“INSERT INTO table VALUES (‘value1′,’value2′,’value3′,’value4′)”);

and so here we have to find a way to convert the array into a format of ‘value1′,’value2′,’value3′,’value4′. And replace it into the array.

In my past post Join all elements of an array together and become a string, I show you how to make all the elements of an array into a string and in this case, we could use this to help us.

Now we use the implode( ) function to make all the elements of an array into a string and to put ‘,’ as the separators. We create a variable here to store the string:

<?php 
$arrayOne[0] = "MrX";
$arrayOne[1] = "1234Street";
$arrayOne[2] = "Football";
$arrayOne[3] = "123456";
 
$astring = implode("', '", $arrayOne);
?>

The above operation, we get: MrX’,’1234Street’,'Football’,’123456 which is not quite as the format of ‘value1′,’value2′,’value3′,’value4′, so we have to do a little more here:

<?php 
$arrayOne[0] = "MrX";
$arrayOne[1] = "1234Street";
$arrayOne[2] = "Football";
$arrayOne[3] = "123456";
 
$astring = implode("', '", $arrayOne);
$astringTwo = "'".$astring."'";
?>

So now, we included a ‘ at the begging and end of the string and we get the format:
‘MrX’,’1234Street’,'Football’,’123456′
we create another variable $astringTwo to store the newest string.

Now we run the inserting query to complete the job:

<?php 
$arrayOne[0] = "MrX";
$arrayOne[1] = "1234Street";
$arrayOne[2] = "Football";
$arrayOne[3] = "123456";
 
$astring = implode("', '", $arrayOne);
$astringTwo = "'".$astring."'";
 
mysql_query("insert into atable VALUES (".$astringTwo.")");
?>