What is the best practice for handling empty search fields in a PHP query to ignore them?

When handling empty search fields in a PHP query, the best practice is to dynamically build the query based on the presence of search parameters. This can be achieved by checking if the search fields are empty and only including them in the query if they contain a value. This approach helps to avoid errors and ensures that only relevant search criteria are used in the query.

// Assuming $searchField1 and $searchField2 are the search parameters
$query = "SELECT * FROM table_name WHERE 1=1";
if (!empty($searchField1)) {
    $query .= " AND column1 = '$searchField1'";
}
if (!empty($searchField2)) {
    $query .= " AND column2 = '$searchField2'";
}

// Execute the query using $query