initializing HTML form using PHP

I have a large HTML form (~100 form elements) that I used a year ago to conduct a survey. Now I would like to use this same form but rather than starting with an empty form I would like to populate the form with a user's survey response from last year. I have the survey data in a mysql db and I know how to use PHP to retrieve a user's data. However, the only way I know to insert a user's data into a form is to embed value="<?php echo $var; >" statements for each form element (text, checkbox, drop-down, etc). This is pretty messy, especially for drop-down lists. Is there a cleaner, easier way to do this? Denis