Are there any best practices for handling form data in PHP scripts?

When handling form data in PHP scripts, it is important to sanitize and validate the input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. One best practice is to use PHP's filter_input() function to sanitize and validate form data before processing it further.

// Sanitize and validate form data using filter_input()
$name = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'name', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$email = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'email', FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);

// Process the sanitized and validated form data
if ($name && $email) {
    // Proceed with processing the form data
} else {
    // Handle validation errors
}