What are the best practices for sorting data retrieved from a MySQL database in PHP?

When retrieving data from a MySQL database in PHP, it's important to sort the data based on specific criteria to present it in a meaningful way to the user. One common way to sort data is by using the ORDER BY clause in your SQL query. This allows you to specify the column by which you want to sort the data and whether it should be in ascending or descending order. 

// 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 data from the database and sort it by a specific column
$sql = "SELECT * FROM table_name ORDER BY column_name ASC"; // Change ASC to DESC for descending order
$result = $conn->query($sql);

if ($result->num_rows > 0) {
    // Output data of each row
    while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
        echo "Column Name: " . $row["column_name"]. "<br>";
    }
} else {
    echo "0 results";
}

$conn->close();

Keywords

MySQL database sorting PHP functions data retrieval

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