What are the potential pitfalls or security concerns when generating HTML pages dynamically with PHP?

One potential pitfall when generating HTML pages dynamically with PHP is the risk of Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks if user input is not properly sanitized. To mitigate this risk, always sanitize and validate user input before using it to generate HTML content. This can be done by using functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape special characters. 

// Sanitize user input before using it in HTML content
$userInput = $_POST['user_input'];
$sanitizedInput = htmlspecialchars($userInput, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

// Use the sanitized input in the HTML content
echo "<p>User input: $sanitizedInput</p>";

Keywords

XSS SQL injection input validation output encoding secure coding practices

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