What are the potential pitfalls of using the plus sign for concatenation in PHP?

Using the plus sign for concatenation in PHP can lead to unexpected results when trying to concatenate variables that are not strings. To avoid this issue, it's recommended to use the `.` operator for concatenation, which explicitly converts non-string variables to strings before concatenating them.

// Using the . operator for concatenation
$string1 = "Hello";
$number = 123;
$string2 = $string1 . $number;
echo $string2; // Output: Hello123