What potential security risks, such as XSS and SQL injection, should be considered and addressed in the PHP code?

Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) is a vulnerability that allows attackers to inject malicious scripts into web pages viewed by other users. To prevent XSS attacks, input validation and output encoding should be used to sanitize user input and prevent script execution. Example PHP code snippet to prevent XSS attacks: 

// Sanitize user input to prevent XSS attacks
$user_input = htmlspecialchars($_POST['user_input'], ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

// Output the sanitized input
echo $user_input;
```

SQL Injection is a vulnerability that allows attackers to manipulate database queries by inserting malicious SQL code. To prevent SQL injection, prepared statements should be used to parameterize queries and prevent attackers from altering the query structure.

Example PHP code snippet to prevent SQL injection:
```php
// Establish a database connection
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=my_database', 'username', 'password');

// Prepare a SQL query using prepared statements
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username");
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $_POST['username']);
$stmt->execute();

// Fetch the results
$results = $stmt->fetchAll();

Keywords

XSS SQL injection security risks PHP code vulnerabilities

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