Are there any common pitfalls to avoid when validating form input in PHP?

One common pitfall to avoid when validating form input in PHP is not properly sanitizing user input, which can leave your application vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. To solve this issue, always use prepared statements or parameterized queries when interacting with a database to prevent malicious input from being executed as SQL commands.

// Example of using prepared statements to sanitize user input
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username');
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $_POST['username']);
$stmt->execute();
$user = $stmt->fetch();