What are the best practices for creating a dropdown menu in PHP for displaying values from a database column?

When creating a dropdown menu in PHP to display values from a database column, it is best practice to retrieve the values from the database using a query, loop through the results to populate the dropdown options, and then display the dropdown menu on the webpage. This ensures that the dropdown menu is dynamically updated with the latest values from the database column. 

<?php
// Connect 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 values from database column
$sql = "SELECT column_name FROM table_name";
$result = $conn->query($sql);

// Create dropdown menu
echo '<select name="dropdown">';
while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
    echo '<option value="' . $row['column_name'] . '">' . $row['column_name'] . '</option>';
}
echo '</select>';

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

Keywords

PHP dropdown menu database column values

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