What potential pitfalls should beginners be aware of when including PHP code in HTML files for form processing?

Beginners should be aware of security risks when including PHP code in HTML files for form processing, such as SQL injection attacks or cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. To mitigate these risks, it is important to properly sanitize and validate user input before processing it in PHP code.

// Example of sanitizing and validating user input in PHP
$name = htmlspecialchars($_POST['name']);
$email = filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);
// Further validation and processing of form data