Not getting all the text from the DB I should

[crayola]

Folks, 

I have a table in a Mysql DB that has a bunch of fields. One of those 
fields "dbdesc" is a text column type that contains the string "This is a
testdb". Below is the output from doing a select * from that table using 
the mysql binary (truncated for brevity). 

| dbname  | dbdesc           | dbsid | and on and on ...
+---------+------------------+-------+ 
| test1db | This is a testdb | test1 | and on and on ...

I am trying to retrieve all the columns from a specific row using the 
code below. 

    connect_to_mysql_db();
    $sth = $dbh->prepare
    ("SELECT dbname, dbdesc, dbsid, dbport, dbhostname, dborahome, 
      dborabase, dbsqluser, dbsqlpass, dbhostuser, dbhostpass FROM
      dbinfo WHERE dbsid=\"$sidloc\"");
    $sth->execute ();
    my @val = $sth->fetchrow_array ();
    $sth->finish ();
    disconnect_mysql_db();

This works great.. I get all my data out of the database 
BUT when I go to print out the "dbdesc" column I only
get the word "This" in $val[1]. It should be printing out the 
entire sentance contained in that entry "This is a testdb"

    print "Database Description: <input type=text maxlength=300 size=50 
           name=desc value=$val[1] ><br>\r\n";

Why does $val[1] only contain "This" and not "This is a testdb"?

Any idea where I am going wrong? 

Thanks, 
Mike