What potential pitfalls should PHP developers be aware of when using includes in PHP pages?

One potential pitfall when using includes in PHP pages is the risk of including files from untrusted sources, which can lead to security vulnerabilities such as code injection or file inclusion attacks. To mitigate this risk, developers should always sanitize user input and validate file paths before including them in PHP pages. 

// Example of including a file with sanitized input
$filename = 'includes/' . basename($_GET['file']);
if (file_exists($filename)) {
    include $filename;
} else {
    echo 'File not found';
}

Keywords

file inclusion security risks include_once require path traversal

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