What potential risks or drawbacks are associated with including code from a string in PHP?

Including code from a string in PHP can pose security risks such as code injection attacks if the string is not properly sanitized. To mitigate this risk, it is important to validate and sanitize any user input before executing it as code. This can be done by using functions like `htmlspecialchars()` to escape special characters or `filter_var()` to validate input. 

// Sanitize and validate input before executing as code
$user_input = $_POST['user_input']; // Assuming user input is coming from a form
$clean_input = htmlspecialchars($user_input); // Sanitize input using htmlspecialchars

// Execute the sanitized input as code
eval($clean_input);

Keywords

eval security vulnerability code injection remote code execution XSS

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