What best practices should be followed when dynamically populating a dropdown menu in PHP from a database?

When dynamically populating a dropdown menu in PHP from a database, it is best practice to retrieve the data from the database, loop through the results, and generate the options for the dropdown menu using a loop. This ensures that the dropdown menu is always up to date with the data in the database. 

<?php
// Connect to the database
$connection = new mysqli('localhost', 'username', 'password', 'database');

// Check connection
if ($connection->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $connection->connect_error);
}

// Query to retrieve data for dropdown menu
$query = "SELECT id, name FROM options";
$result = $connection->query($query);

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

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

Keywords

SQL queries PDO prepared statements data sanitization dropdown menu.

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