What are the best practices for populating a select dropdown field in PHP with data from a database?

When populating a select dropdown field in PHP with data from a database, the best practice is to first establish a connection to the database, retrieve the data you want to populate the dropdown with, and then loop through the data to create the options for the select dropdown. 

<?php
// Establish a connection to the database
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "database";
$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}

// Retrieve data from the database
$sql = "SELECT id, name FROM table";
$result = $conn->query($sql);

// Populate the select dropdown with data
echo "<select name='dropdown'>";
while ($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
    echo "<option value='" . $row['id'] . "'>" . $row['name'] . "</option>";
}
echo "</select>";

// Close the database connection
$conn->close();
?>

Keywords

SQL MySQL PDO fetchAll foreach

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