Failed to iterate over selected rows - php

Question

The code is supposed to get a row at each loop and build td elements for each data piece. However, it only gets some rows while missing others even though all rows were selected:
$query = "select * from category";
$ret = mysql_query($query, $conn);
while ($rows = mysql_fetch_assoc($ret)) {
echo "<tr>";
foreach ($rows as $val) {
echo "<td>{$val}</td>";
}
}

Answer 1

mysql_fetch_assoc returns an associative array. To display each returned row, do something like this (taken directly from the php.net page for mysql_fetch_assoc
while ($row = mysql_fetch_assoc($result)) {
echo $row["userid"];
echo $row["fullname"];
echo $row["userstatus"];
}

Answer 2

Try removing the curly braces like this:
echo "<td>$val</td>";
Beside you didn't close the <tr> tag. So you should do this:
$query = "select * from category";
$ret = mysql_query($query, $conn);
while ($rows = mysql_fetch_assoc($ret)) {
echo "<tr>";
foreach ($rows as $val) {
echo "<td>$val</td>";
}
echo"</tr>";
}
Now like Jack Albright said you should consider various columns of your table to display specific data. Upon that the while() is already a look, I think you don't need to add any foreach() inside. SO your final code should look like this:
$query = "select * from category";
$ret = mysql_query($query, $conn);
while ($rows = mysql_fetch_assoc($ret)) {
echo "<tr>";
echo "<td>$rows['columnName']</td>";
echo "</tr>";
}