What are some common pitfalls when setting up a guestbook script in PHP?

One common pitfall when setting up a guestbook script in PHP is not properly sanitizing user input, which can leave your application vulnerable to SQL injection attacks. To fix this, always use prepared statements when interacting with your database to prevent malicious input from being executed as SQL commands. 

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

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

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

Keywords

SQL injection form validation XSS attacks file permissions CSRF protection

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