What best practices should be followed when attempting to create a mail merge in Word using PHP?

When attempting to create a mail merge in Word using PHP, it is important to properly format the data source and template document. Make sure the data source is in a compatible format such as CSV or Excel, and the template document contains merge fields that correspond to the columns in the data source. Use PHP to read the data source, replace the merge fields in the template document with the corresponding data, and save the merged document.

<?php
// Load the data source (e.g. CSV file)
$data = array_map('str_getcsv', file('data.csv'));

// Load the template document
$template = file_get_contents('template.docx');

// Replace merge fields in the template with data from the data source
foreach ($data as $row) {
    $mergedDocument = $template;
    foreach ($row as $key => $value) {
        $mergedDocument = str_replace("{{" . $key . "}}", $value, $mergedDocument);
    }
    
    // Save the merged document
    file_put_contents('merged_documents/document_' . $row['id'] . '.docx', $mergedDocument);
}
?>