What are the potential pitfalls of including PHP files within other PHP files for website structure?

Including PHP files within other PHP files can lead to potential pitfalls such as namespace conflicts, variable scope issues, and security vulnerabilities if not handled properly. To mitigate these risks, it is important to use functions or classes to encapsulate code in included files and avoid defining global variables. 

// Example of encapsulating code in included files using functions

// main.php
include 'functions.php';

// Call a function from the included file
echo addNumbers(2, 3);

// functions.php
function addNumbers($num1, $num2) {
    return $num1 + $num2;
}

Keywords

include require file inclusion code duplication namespace collision

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