title: Pre-selecting values in a multi-select drop-down list in laravel
body: <p>I'm relatively new to Laravel (and using Laravel 4), but been around PHP and C# a long time.  Seems like this should be easy, but I can't find anywhere that tells me how to do this.</p>
  
  <p>In my Controller I get the data from the database and send it to the view like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>$sections = DB::table('paperSections')-&gt;lists('section','id');
  return View::make('layouts.publisher.step2', array('sections' =&gt; $sections));
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>in my View, I have the following:</p>
  
  <pre><code>{{ Form::select('sections[]', $sections, '', array('multiple')) }}
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>which generates a select list like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;select multiple="multiple" id="sections" name="sections"&gt;
  &lt;option value="1"&gt;News&lt;/option&gt;
  &lt;option value="2"&gt;Sports&lt;/option&gt;
  &lt;option value="3"&gt;Features&lt;/option&gt;
  &lt;option value="4"&gt;Arts and Entertainment&lt;/option&gt;
  &lt;option value="5"&gt;Technology and Science&lt;/option&gt;
  &lt;option value="6"&gt;Op-Ed&lt;/option&gt;
  &lt;/select&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Lets assume I have a string (e.g. "1,3,5") which represents the multiple options selected previously.  How can I re-select those three options using that string?</p>