How can one effectively follow up on leads or suggestions for PHP functions or solutions?

Issue: You have a form on your website that is not properly sanitizing user input, leaving it vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. To solve this issue, you need to use the mysqli_real_escape_string function to escape special characters in the input before inserting it into the database. PHP Code Snippet:

// Connect to the database
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "database");

// Check connection
if ($mysqli->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $mysqli->connect_error);
}

// Sanitize user input
$username = mysqli_real_escape_string($mysqli, $_POST['username']);
$password = mysqli_real_escape_string($mysqli, $_POST['password']);

// Insert sanitized input into the database
$sql = "INSERT INTO users (username, password) VALUES ('$username', '$password')";
if ($mysqli->query($sql) === TRUE) {
    echo "New record created successfully";
} else {
    echo "Error: " . $sql . "<br>" . $mysqli->error;
}

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