What potential pitfalls should beginners be aware of when implementing a search functionality on a website with PHP?

Beginners should be aware of potential security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection when implementing a search functionality on a website with PHP. To mitigate this risk, it is important to use prepared statements or parameterized queries to sanitize user input before executing SQL queries. 

// Example of using prepared statements for search functionality
$searchTerm = $_GET['search'];

$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM products WHERE name LIKE ?");
$stmt->execute(["%$searchTerm%"]);
$results = $stmt->fetchAll();

Keywords

SQL injection XSS attacks PHP functions pagination error handling

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