What are the potential pitfalls of ignoring the third parameter in htmlspecialchars() in PHP?

Ignoring the third parameter in htmlspecialchars() leaves your application vulnerable to XSS attacks as it does not properly encode characters. To mitigate this risk, always set the third parameter to specify the character encoding to be used. This ensures that all characters are properly encoded and displayed safely on your website. 

// Fix for ignoring the third parameter in htmlspecialchars()
$encoded_string = htmlspecialchars($input_string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

Keywords

htmlspecialchars third parameter character encoding security vulnerability cross-site scripting

Related Questions