What potential pitfalls should be considered when storing text with formatting in a MySQL database using PHP?
When storing text with formatting in a MySQL database using PHP, potential pitfalls to consider include SQL injection attacks if the input is not properly sanitized, encoding issues if the text contains special characters, and potential loss of formatting if the database field type does not support the desired formatting. To mitigate these risks, it is important to use prepared statements to prevent SQL injection attacks, properly escape the text using functions like mysqli_real_escape_string to handle special characters, and choose an appropriate field type like TEXT or LONGTEXT to store formatted text.
// Assuming $conn is the mysqli connection object
// Sanitize the input text
$formattedText = mysqli_real_escape_string($conn, $formattedText);
// Prepare the SQL statement using a prepared statement
$stmt = $conn->prepare("INSERT INTO your_table_name (formatted_text_column) VALUES (?)");
$stmt->bind_param("s", $formattedText);
$stmt->execute();
$stmt->close();
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