What are the best practices for storing postal codes in PHP applications to avoid data loss or conversion issues?

When storing postal codes in PHP applications, it is important to treat them as strings rather than integers to avoid data loss or conversion issues. Postal codes can contain leading zeros, which may be removed if stored as integers. Therefore, storing postal codes as strings ensures that the data is preserved accurately.

// Storing postal codes as strings in PHP
$postalCode = '12345';