In PHP, what is the correct way to retrieve and assign a birthdate from a MySQL database to a variable for further processing, without using unnecessary functions like echo?

When retrieving a birthdate from a MySQL database in PHP, you can assign it to a variable for further processing by fetching the result from the database query and storing it in a variable. To avoid unnecessary functions like echo, you can simply assign the fetched birthdate to a variable without any additional output.

// Assume $conn is the MySQL database connection
$query = "SELECT birthdate FROM users WHERE id = 1";
$result = mysqli_query($conn, $query);
$row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result);
$birthdate = $row['birthdate'];