title: Laravel 5.7 how can I populate a form::select from my controller
body: <p>I have seen similar questions and their answers, but none of them have worked so far for my case. I guess this issue is something simple, but I cannot find the solution for I have tried several ways to populate my dropdown list to no avail.
  This is my controller:</p>
  
  <pre><code>    namespace MIS\Http\Controllers;
  
      use MIS\Http\Controllers\Controller;
      use Illuminate\Http\Request;
      use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;
      use Illuminate\Support\Facades\View;
      use Response;
  
      class pagesController extends Controller
      {
  
         public function provinces()
         {
            $data = DB::table('provinces')-&gt;select('province_code', 'province_name_english')-&gt;get();
            return view('pages/provinces', 'data');
         }
      }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This is my view code:</p>
  
  <pre><code>   &lt;div class="content"&gt;
        {!! Form::open(['url' =&gt; '']) !!}
        &lt;div class="title m-b-md"&gt;Address&lt;/div&gt;
        {!! Form::select("provinceList", $data, "Siemreab", ['class' =&gt; 'form-control']) !!}
        &lt;select id="districtList"&gt;&lt;/select&gt;&lt;br /&gt;
        &lt;select id="communeList"&gt;&lt;/select&gt;&lt;br /&gt;
        &lt;select id="villageList"&gt;&lt;/select&gt;&lt;br /&gt;
        {!! Form::close() !!}
     &lt;/div&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This keeps giving me errors like:
     - array_merge(): Argument #2 is not an array  (for that controller/action)</p>
  
  <p>If I change my method to this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>return view('pages/provinces')-&gt;with('data', $data); 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I get this error:</p>
  
  <p>htmlspecialchars() expects parameter 1 to be string, object given (View: D:\web\app\MIS\resources\views\pages\provinces.blade.php)</p>
  
  <p>To mention only two of the different ways I have tested so far.
  I seems there is no way for the view to receive an array from the controller.</p>
  
  <p>Any help is appreciated.</p>