What are best practices for storing and retrieving status values in external files in PHP?

When storing status values in external files in PHP, it is best practice to use a simple format like JSON or CSV to store the values. This allows for easy retrieval and updating of status values without the need to modify the PHP code. To retrieve the status values, you can read the external file and decode the contents into an array or object in PHP.

// Storing status values in an external JSON file
$statusFile = 'status.json';

// Retrieving status values from the external file
$statusData = file_get_contents($statusFile);
$statusValues = json_decode($statusData, true);

// Accessing specific status values
echo $statusValues['status_key'];