What are the potential risks of not using htmlspecialchars for user input in PHP?

Not using htmlspecialchars for user input in PHP can leave your application vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, where malicious scripts are injected into your web pages. To prevent this, always sanitize user input using htmlspecialchars to escape special characters before displaying it on your website. 

$user_input = "<script>alert('XSS attack');</script>";
$sanitized_input = htmlspecialchars($user_input, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
echo $sanitized_input;

Keywords

XSS security vulnerability user input sanitization htmlentities cross-site scripting

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