What are the potential pitfalls of not properly handling special characters like apostrophes in PHP code?

Not properly handling special characters like apostrophes in PHP code can lead to syntax errors or unexpected behavior in your application. To avoid this issue, you should always escape special characters using functions like mysqli_real_escape_string() when dealing with database queries or htmlspecialchars() when outputting data to prevent SQL injection attacks or cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. 

// Example of properly handling apostrophes in PHP code
$unsafe_input = "John's book";
$safe_input = mysqli_real_escape_string($connection, $unsafe_input);

// Now $safe_input can be safely used in a database query
$query = "INSERT INTO table_name (column_name) VALUES ('$safe_input')";
mysqli_query($connection, $query);

Keywords

SQL injection htmlentities addslashes htmlspecialchars escaping characters

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