What are some common pitfalls that beginners in PHP should be aware of when learning the language?

One common pitfall for beginners in PHP is not properly escaping user input, which can lead to security vulnerabilities like SQL injection attacks. To prevent this, always sanitize and validate user input before using it in your code.

// Sanitize and validate user input
$user_input = $_POST['user_input'];
$clean_input = htmlspecialchars(strip_tags(trim($user_input));