What are some best practices for handling character escaping and manipulation in PHP scripts to avoid issues like the one described in the forum thread?

The issue described in the forum thread likely stems from not properly escaping user input before using it in SQL queries, which can lead to SQL injection attacks. To avoid such issues, always use prepared statements with parameterized queries when interacting with a database in PHP. 

// Connect to the database
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase', 'username', 'password');

// Prepare a statement with a parameterized query
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username');

// Bind the parameter and execute the query
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $_POST['username']);
$stmt->execute();

// Fetch the results
$results = $stmt->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

// Use the results as needed
foreach ($results as $row) {
    echo $row['username'] . '<br>';
}

Keywords

htmlspecialchars htmlentities addslashes mysqli_real_escape_string SQL injection

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