What are some best practices for populating dropdown menus in PHP forms using XML data?

When populating dropdown menus in PHP forms using XML data, it is best practice to parse the XML data and extract the necessary information to populate the dropdown options dynamically. This ensures that the dropdown menu stays up to date with any changes in the XML data. One way to achieve this is by using SimpleXML in PHP to parse the XML data and generate the dropdown options. 

// Load the XML data
$xml = simplexml_load_file('data.xml');

// Output the dropdown menu
echo '<select name="dropdown">';
foreach ($xml->children() as $item) {
    echo '<option value="' . $item->value . '">' . $item->label . '</option>';
}
echo '</select>';

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