What are the potential pitfalls of using fopen() in PHP, and how can they be mitigated?

One potential pitfall of using fopen() in PHP is not properly handling errors that may occur during file opening. To mitigate this, you should always check the return value of fopen() to ensure the file was opened successfully before proceeding with any file operations. 

$file = fopen("example.txt", "r");
if ($file) {
    // File opened successfully, proceed with file operations
    fclose($file);
} else {
    // Handle error opening file
    echo "Error opening file";
}

Keywords

fopen PHP error handling file permissions security

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