defining variables inside a counter

I am trying to define variables inside a counter for later use. Check this out:

 $i = 0;
while($candidatelist = mysql_fetch_array($candidates))
{
$i++;
$candidateid = $candidatelist['id'];
} 

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$candidates comes from a database. The $candidatelist array returns 2 results.
What i want to do is add the counter variable to the $candidateid variable so I can separate them out for later use.
Like I would like $candidateid1, $candidateid2 etc for use in an ajax function. For the life of me I can't get it to work.
I tried things like.

$candidateid.$i =  $candidateid.$i;

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and

$candidateid + $i;

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But those doesn't seem to work. This seems like a simple thing to do, but i just can't get it to work.
Can anyone help?