Best practice question in the event a user selects multiple itmes from a category lis

[learningPHP1]

Hello,

I wrote a small script that basically displays 20 to 30 categories on a page which a user has the option toeither select one or multiple items from the list. For the sack of argument the user selected the following items from the list:

Table-> tbl_category : ‘Green car’, ‘truck’, ‘Van’, ‘minivan’,’ laptop’, ‘iPhone’, ‘great value mixed nuts 80% peanuts’, ‘cup’

Tables I have:
Table-> tbl_user
Table-> tbl_category

What is the best practice in terms of saving the multiple selection:

1.Do I create a field in tbl_user and save the selection or selections into that one field?
2. Create a separate tbl_saveCategoreySelection and save them as individual records and link it to tbl_user? 


At the same time the saved category list will need to be searchable.

Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks

[Barand]

definitely option 2

 

A separate table with columns :

userID,

categoryID,

primary key (userID, categoryID)