PHP MYSQL unable to store object properties in table

I'm trying to add iterate through an object and add those object properties to mysql database. Using:

//This works
$sql = "CREATE TABLE $table ($ID int primary key auto_increment not null)";
mysql_query($sql);
//This works
function iterateObject($obj, $name='') {
  foreach ($obj as $key=>$val) {
    $myName = ($name !='') ? $name . "_" . $key : $key;
    if ( is_object($val) || is_array($val) ) {
      iterateObject($val, $myName);
    } else {
      //This works
      $sql = ("ALTER TABLE home_timeline ADD COLUMN $myName VARCHAR(256);");
      mysql_query($sql);

      //This doesn't work
      $sql2 = ("INSERT INTO home_timeline ($myName) VALUES ($val);");
      mysql_query($sql2);
      print "$myName - $val <br />";
    }
  }
}

The table is created and altered so that each iteration adds a new column to the table but when I try and add values to that column (second s开发者_Go百科ql statement) everything is null and the script creates 20+ rows rather than having all the values appear on one row in the relevant column. Could someone help?

why not use functions like serialize() and unserialize() when converting objects to/from string?

second: if $val is string, then in the query put the string delimiters

"INSERT INTO home_timeline (`$myName`) VALUES ('$val');"

though inserting parameters via concatenation is a very bad practice prone to SQL injection.

If you have further problems, output the query before execution and put it here. You might be experiencing the case when you got a lot of columns which can't be nulls, and have no default values. Also output the table structure here.