What are the potential pitfalls of using regular expressions in PHP for database queries?

Using regular expressions in PHP for database queries can lead to performance issues and potential security vulnerabilities, such as SQL injection attacks. It is recommended to use prepared statements with parameterized queries to prevent these risks.

// Example of using prepared statements with parameterized queries in PHP for database queries
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username");
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $username);
$stmt->execute();