How can PHP functions like addslashes and stripslashes help mitigate security risks associated with user input?

When dealing with user input in PHP, it is important to sanitize and validate the data to prevent security risks such as SQL injection attacks. Functions like addslashes and stripslashes can help mitigate these risks by escaping special characters before storing user input in a database and removing any slashes when retrieving data.

// Sanitize user input before storing in database
$userInput = "John's input";
$sanitizedInput = addslashes($userInput);

// Retrieve and unsanitize user input from database
$retrievedInput = "John\'s input";
$unsanitizedInput = stripslashes($retrievedInput);