PHP HTML table

hey guys,
i have a PHP function that reads a file into a resulting array. i then need to use the rows in the PHP array to populate an HTML table. the problem is that the rows are a mixture of single elements (header lines) and rows of 5 elements (table columns). i need the single element rows to span across the 5columns where the tabbed data is below. all the data rows (with 5 elements) have a "+" sign in them, meaning that i can test for pos of + sign to determine whether the row is one header or 5 <TD>s. any pointers? i am thinking that JS is the way to go but i am new to that.

 

You describe the scenario but what's the problem?

I don't know much about PHP but in HTML you would set colspan to 5 in your header rows.