I have an insert record form that contains a checkbox group called "servicesID". This checkbox group contains checkboxes labeled as services for a construction project (architecture, plumbing, electrical, etc) that are entered into a field in a db record as a set. I can insert the record without a problem - the set in the record contains the comma-separated values as a string. I did this by imploding the data to create the string.

The problem is that I now want to create an update record form and I want the checkboxes to populate with the values from the MySQL set but I'm not sure how to do this. I'm guessing i need to "explode" them somehow? But I'm not sure at all how to do this.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks for looking.

You're right using explode if you've stored the data as csv's is the best way to do this.

$data=explode(",",$row['fieldname']);
//replacing fieldname with your you own
foreach($data as $value)
{
  echo "<option value=\"$value\">$value</option>"
}

placing this inside your <select> tag should normally work.