What are some common pitfalls when using PHP to manipulate text content?

One common pitfall when manipulating text content in PHP is not properly sanitizing user input, which can lead to security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. To avoid this, always use functions like htmlspecialchars() or mysqli_real_escape_string() to sanitize user input before using it in your code. 

// Sanitize user input using htmlspecialchars()
$user_input = "<script>alert('XSS attack');</script>";
$sanitized_input = htmlspecialchars($user_input, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
echo $sanitized_input;

Keywords

string manipulation regular expressions encoding issues character encoding text processing

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