Stroring html form settings

Hello,

I have some html forms that I save the settings into the database,
things like which item was selected in the menu and if a checkbox was
checked. The table looks like this:

user_id | report_id | info
---------+-----------+------------------------------------------------
111 | 1 | A:::::CHECKED::::CHECKED::::CHECKED::
111 | 2 | A:::CHECKED::
111 | 3 | A::CHECKED:CHECKED::CHECKED::::CHECKED:::

The info column has the settings separated with a : and consecutive
colons mean the user didn't make a selection. Would this be the way
to store them?

I've done some searching and I could use XML (I will read some
tutorials after writing this email). But there may be other ways and
I'm just too much of a newbie to know. I'm using Postgresql 8.1.11
and PHP on CentOS 5.2.

Thanks in advance.

Dianne