What best practices should be followed to prevent SQL injection vulnerabilities in PHP scripts?
SQL injection vulnerabilities can be prevented in PHP scripts by using prepared statements with parameterized queries instead of directly inserting user input into SQL queries. This helps to prevent malicious SQL code from being injected into the query and executed on the database.
// Establish a database connection
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase', 'username', 'password');
// Prepare a SQL statement with a parameterized query
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username');
// Bind the parameter value to the query
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $_POST['username']);
// Execute the query
$stmt->execute();
// Fetch the results
$results = $stmt->fetchAll();