What are the potential pitfalls when parsing text with PHP?

When parsing text with PHP, potential pitfalls include not properly handling encoding issues, overlooking the possibility of malformed or unexpected input, and not considering the performance implications of the parsing method chosen. To avoid these pitfalls, always sanitize and validate input data, handle different character encodings properly, and choose efficient parsing techniques. 

// Example of properly handling encoding and validating input data
$text = $_POST['text'] ?? ''; // Get input data from a form
$text = mb_convert_encoding($text, 'UTF-8', 'auto'); // Convert to UTF-8 encoding
$text = filter_var($text, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING); // Sanitize the input data

// Example of using a simple parsing technique
$words = explode(' ', $text); // Split the text into an array of words using space as delimiter
foreach ($words as $word) {
    echo $word . "<br>"; // Output each word
}

Keywords

Regular expressions PHP functions memory usage error handling data validation

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