What are some potential pitfalls of using external website results in PHP?

One potential pitfall of using external website results in PHP is that the external website may change their structure or data format, causing your code to break. To mitigate this risk, you can parse the external website's data using a reliable library or API that is less likely to change. 

// Example using cURL to fetch external website data
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, 'http://example.com/data');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

// Parse the data using a library like SimpleHTMLDom or JSON decoding
$parsed_data = json_decode($data);
// Use the parsed data in your PHP code

Keywords

web scraping security vulnerabilities cross-site scripting data validation API integration

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