What are common pitfalls when using PHP to handle form submissions?

One common pitfall when handling form submissions in PHP is not properly sanitizing user input, which can leave your application vulnerable to security risks such as SQL injection attacks. To solve this issue, always use functions like htmlspecialchars() or mysqli_real_escape_string() to sanitize user input before processing it.

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