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

One common pitfall to avoid when handling form submissions in PHP is not properly sanitizing user input, which can leave your application vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. To solve this issue, always use prepared statements or parameterized queries when interacting with your database to prevent malicious input from being executed as SQL commands.

// Example of using prepared statements to handle form submissions securely
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO users (username, password) VALUES (:username, :password)");
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $_POST['username']);
$stmt->bindParam(':password', $_POST['password']);
$stmt->execute();