Are there any best practices to follow when using CURL in PHP to interact with external databases?

When using CURL in PHP to interact with external databases, it is important to follow best practices to ensure secure and efficient communication. This includes properly sanitizing user input to prevent SQL injection attacks, using HTTPS to encrypt data transmission, and handling errors gracefully to provide informative feedback to users.

// Example code snippet for using CURL in PHP to interact with an external database

// Initialize CURL session
$ch = curl_init();

// Set CURL options
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'https://example.com/api/database');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query(['data' => $data]));

// Execute CURL request
$response = curl_exec($ch);

// Check for errors
if(curl_errno($ch)){
    echo 'CURL error: ' . curl_error($ch);
}

// Close CURL session
curl_close($ch);

// Process response data
$data = json_decode($response, true);