What potential pitfalls should be considered when saving user input from a PHP-generated HTML page?

When saving user input from a PHP-generated HTML page, it is important to consider potential security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection attacks. To prevent this, it is recommended to sanitize and validate user input before saving it to a database. This can be done by using prepared statements for database queries and filtering input data to remove any potentially harmful characters. 

// Example of sanitizing and validating user input before saving to a database

// Assuming $conn is the database connection

// Sanitize user input
$user_input = filter_var($_POST['user_input'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Validate user input
if (!empty($user_input)) {
    // Prepare SQL statement using a prepared statement
    $stmt = $conn->prepare("INSERT INTO table_name (column_name) VALUES (?)");
    $stmt->bind_param("s", $user_input);
    
    // Execute the statement
    $stmt->execute();
    
    // Close the statement and connection
    $stmt->close();
    $conn->close();
} else {
    echo "Invalid input";
}

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting data validation sanitization prepared statements

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