Are there any best practices or alternative methods for achieving the desired result in PHP?

Issue: When working with PHP, it's important to follow best practices to ensure clean, efficient, and secure code. One common best practice is to use prepared statements when interacting with a database to prevent SQL injection attacks. Solution: To achieve this, you can use PDO (PHP Data Objects) to create prepared statements. This involves preparing the SQL query with placeholders for dynamic values and then binding the actual values to these placeholders before executing the query. This helps to sanitize user input and prevent malicious SQL code from being executed.

// Establish a database connection using PDO
$dsn = 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase';
$username = 'username';
$password = 'password';
$pdo = new PDO($dsn, $username, $password);

// Prepare a SQL query with placeholders
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username');

// Bind values to the placeholders
$username = 'john_doe';
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $username, PDO::PARAM_STR);

// Execute the query
$stmt->execute();

// Fetch the results
$results = $stmt->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

// Loop through the results
foreach ($results as $row) {
    echo $row['username'] . '<br>';
}