What common beginner mistakes can lead to errors when using PHP?

One common beginner mistake in PHP is not properly escaping user input, which can lead to security vulnerabilities like SQL injection attacks. To solve this issue, always sanitize and validate user input before using it in your code.

// Example of sanitizing user input using mysqli_real_escape_string
$user_input = $_POST['user_input'];
$clean_input = mysqli_real_escape_string($connection, $user_input);