What are common pitfalls to avoid when working with form submissions in PHP?

One common pitfall to avoid when working with form submissions in PHP is not properly sanitizing user input, which can leave your application vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. To solve this issue, always use prepared statements or parameterized queries when interacting with a database to prevent malicious code from being executed.

// Example of using prepared statements to sanitize user input
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO users (username, password) VALUES (:username, :password)");
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $_POST['username']);
$stmt->bindParam(':password', $_POST['password']);
$stmt->execute();