What potential pitfalls should PHP developers be aware of when working with form data?

One potential pitfall PHP developers should be aware of when working with form data is the risk of SQL injection attacks. To prevent this, developers should always sanitize and validate user input before using it in database queries. This can be done using functions like mysqli_real_escape_string() or prepared statements to prevent malicious SQL code from being executed. 

// Sanitize user input to prevent SQL injection
$user_input = mysqli_real_escape_string($connection, $_POST['user_input']);

// Or use prepared statements
$stmt = $connection->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ?");
$stmt->bind_param("s", $_POST['username']);
$stmt->execute();
$result = $stmt->get_result();

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting (XSS) data validation form sanitization CSRF protection

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