Why does htmlentities not encode certain characters like quotes and greater than signs, and is this a security concern when storing data in a database?

htmlentities does not encode certain characters like quotes and greater than signs because they are commonly used in HTML and should not be encoded for display purposes. However, this can be a security concern when storing user input in a database as it could potentially lead to SQL injection attacks. To prevent this, you can use the mysqli_real_escape_string function in PHP to escape special characters before storing them in the database. 

// Connect to the database
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "database");

// Escape special characters in user input before storing in the database
$user_input = mysqli_real_escape_string($mysqli, $_POST['user_input']);

// Insert the escaped user input into the database
$query = "INSERT INTO table_name (column_name) VALUES ('$user_input')";
$mysqli->query($query);

Keywords

htmlentities encoding characters security concern database storage

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