What potential pitfalls should beginners be aware of when creating PHP forms?

Beginners should be aware of potential security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting when creating PHP forms. To prevent these issues, it is important to properly sanitize and validate user input before processing it in the form.

// Sanitize and validate user input before processing
$name = htmlspecialchars($_POST['name']);
$email = filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);
$message = htmlspecialchars($_POST['message']);

// Process the form data
// Code to process the form data goes here