I was just hoping someone could steer me in the right direction with this -- i'm teaching myself php/mysql and i have something on the 'signup' page of my site... there is a long list of options, of which there are no limit from which to choose, and i'm wondering if there's an easy way to set up one column of a database to handle this information... perhaps i can give each option a number in the html code and have a snippet of php code that brakes down the code, or something... What it is, is a list of basically every musical instrument... and my hope is i can have one entry like 4,5,15,29 into one cell of a database, to represent say for example, guitar,piano,kazoo,violin; and then have my search script look at that ONE cell and read the numbers and know what it means -- hopefully someone will understand this rambling. i'm not so much looking for a solution from you, just guidance, i guess. Thankyou.