How can relative paths and special characters impact PHP scripts and database connections?

Relative paths and special characters can impact PHP scripts and database connections by causing errors or security vulnerabilities. To avoid these issues, it's important to properly sanitize user input, escape special characters, and use absolute paths for file includes and database connections.

<?php
// Example of using absolute path for database connection
$db_host = 'localhost';
$db_user = 'username';
$db_pass = 'password';
$db_name = 'database_name';

$conn = new mysqli($db_host, $db_user, $db_pass, $db_name);
if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}
?>