What are best practices for initializing and managing session variables in PHP?

When initializing and managing session variables in PHP, it is important to start the session using session_start() at the beginning of each script that needs to access session data. It is also recommended to set session variables using $_SESSION['variable_name'] syntax and to unset session variables using unset($_SESSION['variable_name']) when they are no longer needed to free up memory.

// Start the session
session_start();

// Set a session variable
$_SESSION['username'] = 'john_doe';

// Unset a session variable
unset($_SESSION['username']);