What are the potential security risks of including content from external pages in PHP?

Including content from external pages in PHP can introduce security risks such as cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, remote code execution, and data injection. To mitigate these risks, it is important to sanitize and validate any external content before including it in your PHP code.

// Sanitize and validate external content before including it
$externalContent = filter_var($externalContent, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$externalContent = htmlspecialchars($externalContent, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

echo $externalContent;