What are some best practices for populating form fields with data from a database in PHP?

When populating form fields with data from a database in PHP, it is important to first retrieve the data from the database and then assign it to the respective form fields. This can be achieved by querying the database for the specific data and then using PHP to echo the data into the value attribute of the form fields. 

<?php
// Connect to database
$connection = mysqli_connect('localhost', 'username', 'password', 'database');

// Query database for specific data
$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE id = 1";
$result = mysqli_query($connection, $query);
$row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result);

// Assign data to form fields
$first_name = $row['first_name'];
$last_name = $row['last_name'];
$email = $row['email'];
?>

<!-- HTML form with populated fields -->
<form action="update.php" method="post">
    <input type="text" name="first_name" value="<?php echo $first_name; ?>">
    <input type="text" name="last_name" value="<?php echo $last_name; ?>">
    <input type="email" name="email" value="<?php echo $email; ?>">
    <button type="submit">Update</button>
</form>

Keywords

SQL PDO prepared statements form population data retrieval

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