What are the potential pitfalls of including external text files in PHP scripts, and how can these be avoided to prevent display issues on a webpage?

Including external text files in PHP scripts can lead to display issues on a webpage if the file contains unexpected characters, such as whitespace or BOM markers, before or after the PHP tags. To avoid this, it's important to ensure that the external text files are properly formatted and do not contain any unnecessary characters. 

<?php
ob_start();
include 'external_file.txt';
$content = ob_get_clean();

echo $content;
?>

Keywords

file inclusion security vulnerabilities file path validation PHP include function cross-site scripting

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