What are the potential pitfalls of using placeholders in PHP code?

Potential pitfalls of using placeholders in PHP code include leaving placeholders vulnerable to SQL injection attacks if not properly sanitized. To avoid this issue, always use prepared statements with placeholders when interacting with a database to ensure that user input is safely escaped. 

// Example of using prepared statements with placeholders to prevent SQL injection

// Establish a database connection
$pdo = new PDO("mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase", "username", "password");

// Prepare a SQL statement with placeholders
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username");

// Bind parameter values to the placeholders
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $username, PDO::PARAM_STR);

// Execute the statement
$stmt->execute();

// Fetch the results
$results = $stmt->fetchAll();

Keywords

SQL injection prepared statements PDO data sanitization security vulnerabilities

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