What are the potential pitfalls of storing HTML entities in a database when working with PHP scripts?

Storing HTML entities in a database can lead to issues when displaying the data on a webpage, as the entities will be displayed as text rather than rendered as HTML. To solve this issue, you can use the PHP function html_entity_decode() when retrieving the data from the database to convert HTML entities back to their original characters. 

// Retrieve data from the database
$data = $row['content'];

// Decode HTML entities
$decoded_data = html_entity_decode($data);

// Display the decoded data
echo $decoded_data;

Keywords

HTML entities database storage PHP scripts security vulnerabilities cross-site scripting data sanitization

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