Are there any security concerns to consider when implementing custom BBCode functionality in PHP?

When implementing custom BBCode functionality in PHP, one major security concern is the potential for malicious code injection. To mitigate this risk, it is important to sanitize and validate user input before processing and rendering the BBCode. This can be achieved by using functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape special characters and prevent XSS attacks.

// Sanitize and validate user input before processing BBCode
$user_input = $_POST['user_input'];
$sanitized_input = htmlspecialchars($user_input);

// Process and render BBCode
$bbcode = new BBCodeParser();
$output = $bbcode->parse($sanitized_input);

echo $output;