What are the best practices for handling decimal values in PHP when retrieving data from MySQL?

When retrieving decimal values from MySQL in PHP, it is important to handle them carefully to avoid precision loss or rounding errors. One best practice is to use the `mysqli_fetch_assoc` function to retrieve the decimal values as strings, and then convert them to the desired data type using PHP functions like `floatval` or `number_format`.

// Connect to MySQL database
$conn = mysqli_connect("localhost", "username", "password", "database");

// Retrieve decimal values from MySQL
$query = "SELECT decimal_column FROM table";
$result = mysqli_query($conn, $query);

// Fetch and convert decimal values
while ($row = mysqli_fetch_assoc($result)) {
    $decimalValue = floatval($row['decimal_column']);
    // Do something with $decimalValue
}

// Close connection
mysqli_close($conn);