In the context of PHP programming, what are the advantages of using Prepared Statements for database queries?

Prepared Statements in PHP offer several advantages for database queries, including improved security by preventing SQL injection attacks, better performance as the query is only parsed once and executed multiple times with different parameters, and easier maintenance and readability of the code.

// Using Prepared Statements to execute a query in PHP
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "myDB";

// Create connection
$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}

// Prepare a SQL query using a Prepared Statement
$stmt = $conn->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ?");

// Bind parameters to the Prepared Statement
$stmt->bind_param("s", $username);

// Set parameters and execute the query
$username = "john_doe";
$stmt->execute();

// Get the result set
$result = $stmt->get_result();

// Fetch and display the results
while ($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
    echo "Username: " . $row["username"] . "<br>";
}

// Close the Prepared Statement and connection
$stmt->close();
$conn->close();