What are best practices for handling database queries and displaying data in dropdown menus in PHP applications?

When handling database queries and displaying data in dropdown menus in PHP applications, it is important to properly sanitize user input to prevent SQL injection attacks and to efficiently retrieve and display the data from the database. Using prepared statements can help prevent SQL injection vulnerabilities, and looping through the query results to populate the dropdown menu can ensure that the data is displayed correctly. 

// Connect to the database
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase', 'username', 'password');

// Prepare a SQL query to retrieve the data for the dropdown menu
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT id, name FROM dropdown_data");
$stmt->execute();

// Create the dropdown menu
echo '<select name="dropdown">';
while ($row = $stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC)) {
    echo '<option value="' . $row['id'] . '">' . $row['name'] . '</option>';
}
echo '</select>';

Keywords

SQL injection PDO prepared statements data validation dropdown menus

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