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There are different ways in which a PHP function can be used to retrieve an HTML table, depending on the specific requirements and context of the application. Here is an example of a simple PHP function that retrieves an HTML table from a database:

function getTableFromDatabase($tableName) {
  // Connect to database
  $conn = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "database");

  // Prepare query
  $query = "SELECT * FROM $tableName";

  // Execute query
  $result = $conn->query($query);

  // Check for errors
  if (!$result) {
    echo "Error retrieving data from database: " . $conn->error;
    return;
  }

  // Build HTML table
  $table = "<table>\n<tr>\n<th>ID</th>\n<th>Name</th>\n<th>Email</th>\n</tr>\n";
  while ($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
    $table .= "<tr>\n<td>" . $row["id"] . "</td>\n<td>" . $row["name"] . "</td>\n<td>" . $row["email"] . "</td>\n</tr>\n";
  }
  $table .= "</table>\n";

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

  // Return table
  return $table;
}

This function takes as input the name of a table in a MySQL database and returns an HTML table with the data from that table. The function starts by connecting to the database using the mysqli class, and preparing and executing a query to select all records from the specified table. If the query fails, the function outputs an error message and returns. Otherwise, it builds a string variable containing the HTML code for the table, using a while loop to iterate over the result set and generate rows with the values from each column. Finally, the function closes the database connection and returns the HTML table.

To use this function in a PHP script, you could call it like this:

$table = getTableFromDatabase("users");
echo $table;

This would retrieve a table called "users" from the specified database and output its contents as an HTML table in the web page. The table could be styled using CSS or modified depending on the specific needs of the application.