Mysql reference manual on the ENUM field type. In the comments you can find different solutions for parsing MySQL output. What follows is the best practice with some explanation.

Basically this is a Regular Expressions problem.

MySQL returns something like this:

We need to parse the second column of the dataset. To do this we will use PHP's preg_match_all() function. This functions returns multidimensional array with results which looks like this:

Array (

[0] => Array (
[0] => 'value1'
[1] => 'value2'
[2] => 'value3'
[3] => 'value4' )

[1] => Array (
[0] => value1
[1] => value2
[2] => value3
[3] => value4 )

)

Here is the sample code:

function enum_select( $table , $field ){
$query = " SHOW COLUMNS FROM `$table` LIKE '$field' ";
$result = mysql_query( $query ) or die( 'error getting enum field ' . mysql_error() );
$row = mysql_fetch_array( $result , MYSQL_NUM );
#extract the values
#the values are enclosed in single quotes
#and separated by commas
$regex = "/'(.*?)'/";
preg_match_all( $regex , $row[1], $enum_array );
$enum_fields = $enum_array[1];
return( $enum_fields );
}