What are the potential security risks of directly inserting HTML content into a MySQL database using PHP?

Directly inserting HTML content into a MySQL database using PHP can pose security risks such as SQL injection attacks and cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities. To mitigate these risks, it is recommended to sanitize and validate the HTML content before inserting it into the database. 

// Sanitize and validate HTML content before inserting into MySQL database
$htmlContent = $_POST['html_content']; // Assuming the HTML content is coming from a form submission

// Sanitize HTML content
$cleanHtmlContent = htmlspecialchars($htmlContent);

// Validate HTML content
if (strlen($cleanHtmlContent) > 0) {
    // Insert sanitized HTML content into MySQL database
    $sql = "INSERT INTO table_name (html_content) VALUES ('$cleanHtmlContent')";
    // Execute the SQL query
}

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting htmlentities prepared statements input validation

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