How can PHP developers efficiently loop through and store column information from a SQL table in variables?

To efficiently loop through and store column information from a SQL table in variables, PHP developers can use a loop to fetch each row of data from the SQL query result and store the column values in variables. This can be achieved by using the fetch_assoc() method to fetch an associative array for each row, allowing easy access to column values by their names.

// Assume $conn is the database connection and $sql is the SQL query
$result = $conn->query($sql);

if ($result->num_rows > 0) {
    while ($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
        $column1 = $row['column1'];
        $column2 = $row['column2'];
        // Store additional columns as needed
        // Process or store the column values as required
    }
} else {
    echo "0 results";
}