Help with displaying results from associative array

I believe an associative array is what I need here. I have a column in an html table pulling from a MySQL DB via PHP which displays values from a questions/answer application so it would display something like 4,8,9,12,17 etc. I wanted to set up an associative array to correspond with those numbers such as 4=>I-A,8=>I-B,9=>I-C,12=>I-D,17=>II-C etc. and then have another column which displays the associative values.Would I need to use mysql_fetch_assoc for this?