What are the considerations for handling special characters like '%' in SQL queries generated by PHP to ensure accurate execution of BETWEEN statements for numerical values?

Special characters like '%' in SQL queries generated by PHP can cause issues with accurate execution of BETWEEN statements for numerical values. To handle this, it is important to properly escape or sanitize user input to prevent SQL injection attacks and ensure that special characters are treated as literals rather than wildcard characters. One way to achieve this is by using prepared statements with parameterized queries in PHP.

// Assuming $min and $max are the numerical values for the BETWEEN statement
$min = $_POST['min']; // Example input: 10
$max = $_POST['max']; // Example input: 20

// Establish a database connection
$pdo = new PDO("mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase", "username", "password");

// Prepare a SQL statement with placeholders
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM mytable WHERE mycolumn BETWEEN :min AND :max");

// Bind the parameters
$stmt->bindParam(':min', $min, PDO::PARAM_INT);
$stmt->bindParam(':max', $max, PDO::PARAM_INT);

// Execute the query
$stmt->execute();

// Fetch the results
$results = $stmt->fetchAll(PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

// Loop through the results and do something with them
foreach ($results as $row) {
    // Process each row
}