Creating Array not working as I thought

Question

I've got myself really confused over arrays and I hope someone might be able to help me some.

I'm trying to store users selections of various pictures in a mysql database ( up to 3 pictures to choose from at a time). The selections are in fact checkboxes below each picture and I want to store these selections as $pic_id's in an array.

The selections are getting stored in my database but it seems that they are not being assigned keys as I expected and I can't seem to use them.

I want to be able to use the picture id's to show the selections made.

This is my result: [7] => 11,6 [8] => 9,8

but I need to get at these variables individually. I would expect this: [7] => 11, [8] =>6, [8] => 9, [9] => 8

The form:

 <form action="insert.php" method="GET">
    <?php
    <input type=\"checkbox\" name=\"pic_id[]\" value=".$row['id'].">
    <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Add" />
    ?>

insert.php

$checkBox = implode(',', $_GET['pic_id']);
if (isset($_GET['submit'])) {
$sql="INSERT INTO pics (pic_id) VALUES ('" . $checkBox . "')"; 

Print Array

<?php
    $sql="SELECT * FROM pics";
    $query = mysqli_query($conn, $sql);
    $myArray = Array();
    while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($query, MYSQLI_ASSOC)){
    $myArray[]=$row['pic_id'];  
    }
 print_r($myArray);
?>

See result above.

Answer 1

Just separate the values like you concatenated them when inserting in the database. Then loop through the results and add them to your array.

<?php
    $sql="SELECT * FROM pics";
    $query = mysqli_query($conn, $sql);
    $myArray = array();
    while($row = mysqli_fetch_array($query, MYSQLI_ASSOC)){
        foreach(explode(',', $row['pic_id']) as $id) {
            $myArray[]= $id;  
        }
    }
 print_r($myArray);
?>