How can unsanitized HTML code affect variable passing in PHP forms?

Unsanitized HTML code in PHP forms can lead to security vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, where malicious scripts can be injected into the form fields. To prevent this, it is essential to sanitize user input before processing it in PHP forms. This can be done using functions like htmlspecialchars() to convert special characters to HTML entities, preventing the execution of harmful scripts.

// Sanitize user input before processing in PHP form
$name = htmlspecialchars($_POST['name']);
$email = htmlspecialchars($_POST['email']);
$message = htmlspecialchars($_POST['message']);

// Process the sanitized input
// Code to process the form data goes here