What are the potential risks of not properly handling special characters like ' or ` in PHP scripts?

Improperly handling special characters like ' or ` in PHP scripts can lead to SQL injection attacks, where malicious code is injected into a database query. To prevent this, it is important to properly escape these characters using functions like mysqli_real_escape_string or prepared statements when interacting with a database. 

// Example of properly handling special characters in a SQL query using mysqli_real_escape_string
$conn = mysqli_connect("localhost", "username", "password", "database");

$name = mysqli_real_escape_string($conn, $_POST['name']);
$email = mysqli_real_escape_string($conn, $_POST['email']);

$sql = "INSERT INTO users (name, email) VALUES ('$name', '$email')";
mysqli_query($conn, $sql);

Keywords

SQL injection XSS attacks htmlentities addslashes htmlspecialchars

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