putting sql-query response directly to foreach-loop?

Question

Is there any reason to not do this?
Putting the query directly inside a foreach-statment when the only time the result is going to be used is within that location..

<select>
<?php foreach($dbh->query('SELECT id, name, so FROM Employees ORDER BY so') as $e): ?>
 <option value="<?=$e['so']?>">-- after "<?=$e['name']?>" --</option>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</select>

It seems like I don't have to provide the fetchAll() when doing so either.
In fact, if I just do the following, and not adding any fetch()-methods at all, I still get the result if I put $employees into a foreach-loop:

$employees = $dbh->query('SELECT id, name, so FROM Employees ORDER BY so');
foreach($employees as $e){ /* works same as above */ }

when I do print_r($employees), I only get this string:

PDOStatement Object ( [queryString] => SELECT id, name, so FROM Employees ORDER BY so ) 

Is that correct behaviour?

These are my options for the connection:

 $options = array(
 PDO::ATTR_PERSISTENT => true,
 PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES=>false,
 PDO::ATTR_DEFAULT_FETCH_MODE=>PDO::FETCH_ASSOC,
 PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND=>'SET NAMES utf8',
 PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE=>PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION, // _SILENT (pub) || _WARNING || _EXCEPTION (dev)
 ); 

• Sᴀᴍ Onᴇᴌᴀ: For an explanation of why you can use the query() call inside the foreach see this answer. @YourCommonSense kind of explains this in phpdelusions.net

Answer 1

The idea is very bad, for many reasons.

• your query could fail. It will result in a torn design, with only half the page rendered.
• sometimes you must display a different text if the query returned no rows
• sometimes you need to send your data in a different format. For example not as HTML, but as a JSON-formatted array in response to AJAX call.
• a bowl of spaghetti made from HTML, PHP and SQL makes it hard to maintain. There should be a separation between the data manipulation and the data presentation.

These are my options for the connection:

Some of them are wrong as well

• a cargo cult persistent connection will do you no good
• charset should be set in the DSN
• ERRMODE should NEVER be set to silent. On a live server is should be the same as on dev, i.e. set to EXCEPTION. Errors should be only hidden from a site user, not completely silenced.