What are the potential pitfalls of using PHP for a beginner in programming, especially when working on a project like a recipe search engine?

One potential pitfall for beginners using PHP for a project like a recipe search engine is the lack of proper input validation, which can lead to security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection attacks. To solve this issue, always sanitize and validate user input before using it in database queries. 

// Example of sanitizing user input in PHP
$user_input = $_POST['search_query'];
$clean_input = mysqli_real_escape_string($connection, $user_input);

Keywords

syntax errors SQL injection XSS attacks scalability security vulnerabilities

Related Questions