What are some common pitfalls or misunderstandings that beginners encounter when trying to write data to a database using PHP?

One common pitfall is not properly sanitizing user input before inserting it into the database, leaving the application vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. To prevent this, always use prepared statements with parameterized queries to safely insert data into the database. 

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

// Prepare the SQL statement with a placeholder for the user input
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO users (username, email) VALUES (:username, :email)");

// Bind the parameters with the actual user input
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $username);
$stmt->bindParam(':email', $email);

// Set the values of the parameters
$username = $_POST['username'];
$email = $_POST['email'];

// Execute the prepared statement
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

SQL injection PDO prepared statements data validation error handling

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