What are the potential pitfalls of storing chain-like data with slashes in a PHP application and how can they be avoided?

Storing chain-like data with slashes in a PHP application can cause issues with file paths, URL parsing, and database queries. To avoid these pitfalls, you can sanitize the input data by escaping or encoding the slashes before storing them in the database.

// Sanitize input data by escaping slashes
$input_data = "chain/like/data";
$escaped_data = addslashes($input_data);

// Store sanitized data in the database
$query = "INSERT INTO table_name (column_name) VALUES ('$escaped_data')";
mysqli_query($connection, $query);