What are the potential risks of not properly filtering out bad code from user input in PHP applications?

Not properly filtering out bad code from user input in PHP applications can lead to security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other malicious attacks. To mitigate these risks, it is important to sanitize and validate user input before using it in your application.

// Example of filtering user input using PHP filter_var function
$user_input = $_POST['user_input'];
$filtered_input = filter_var($user_input, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);