Are there any common pitfalls to avoid when implementing a search feature in PHP?

One common pitfall to avoid when implementing a search feature in PHP is not properly sanitizing user input, which can leave your application vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. To prevent this, always use prepared statements when querying your database to ensure that user input is properly escaped. 

// Example of using prepared statements to prevent SQL injection
$searchTerm = $_GET['searchTerm'];
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM products WHERE name LIKE :searchTerm");
$stmt->execute(['searchTerm' => '%'.$searchTerm.'%']);
$results = $stmt->fetchAll();

Keywords

SQL injection XSS attacks full-text search pagination fuzzy search

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