What are the potential security risks involved in using PHP to edit htaccess and htuser files?

When using PHP to edit htaccess and htuser files, there is a potential security risk of allowing malicious code to be injected into these files, which could compromise the security of your server. To prevent this, it is important to sanitize and validate user input before writing it to these files.

// Sanitize and validate user input before writing to htaccess file
$user_input = $_POST['user_input'];
if (preg_match('/^[a-zA-Z0-9_\-]+$/', $user_input)) {
    $htaccess_file = fopen('.htaccess', 'a');
    fwrite($htaccess_file, $user_input);
    fclose($htaccess_file);
} else {
    echo "Invalid input";
}