What are some common pitfalls for beginners when trying to include a guestbook in PHP?

One common pitfall for beginners when including a guestbook in PHP is not properly sanitizing user input, which can leave the application vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. To solve this, always use prepared statements or parameterized queries to interact with the database. 

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

// Prepare a statement with placeholders
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO entries (name, message) VALUES (:name, :message)");

// Bind parameters and execute the statement
$stmt->bindParam(':name', $_POST['name']);
$stmt->bindParam(':message', $_POST['message']);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

SQL injection XSS attacks form validation file permissions PHP include vulnerability

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