What are common pitfalls that beginners in PHP development should be aware of?

One common pitfall for beginners in PHP development is not properly sanitizing user input, leaving the application vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. To prevent this, always use prepared statements or parameterized queries when interacting with databases. 

// Example of using prepared statements to prevent SQL injection
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username');
$stmt->execute(['username' => $username]);
$user = $stmt->fetch();

Keywords

syntax errors security vulnerabilities SQL injection variable scoping error handling

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