What are some best practices for passing employee information (ID or name) to an SQL query in PHP?

When passing employee information such as ID or name to an SQL query in PHP, it is important to use prepared statements to prevent SQL injection attacks. This involves binding parameters to the query rather than directly inserting user input. Additionally, it is recommended to sanitize and validate the input before passing it to the query to ensure data integrity and security.

// Assuming $employeeId contains the employee's ID from user input
$employeeId = $_POST['employee_id'];

// Establish a database connection
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=your_database', 'username', 'password');

// Prepare the SQL query with a placeholder for the employee ID
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM employees WHERE id = :employeeId");

// Bind the employee ID parameter to the query
$stmt->bindParam(':employeeId', $employeeId, PDO::PARAM_INT);

// Execute the query
$stmt->execute();

// Fetch the results
$employee = $stmt->fetch(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

// Do something with the employee data