How can escaping characters in PHP variables, such as in $_GET['news_id'], help prevent errors and ensure proper functionality?
Escaping characters in PHP variables, such as in $_GET['news_id'], helps prevent errors and ensure proper functionality by sanitizing user input. This is important to protect against SQL injection attacks and ensure that the data being passed through variables is safe to use in queries or outputs.
$news_id = mysqli_real_escape_string($conn, $_GET['news_id']);