Are there any best practices for handling user input in PHP search scripts to prevent security vulnerabilities?

When handling user input in PHP search scripts, it is important to sanitize and validate the input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. One way to do this is by using prepared statements and parameterized queries when interacting with a database. Additionally, you can use functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape special characters in user input before displaying it on a webpage. 

// Example of using prepared statements to prevent SQL injection
$searchTerm = $_GET['search'];

// Establish a database connection
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase', 'username', 'password');

// Prepare a SQL statement with a placeholder for the search term
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM products WHERE name LIKE :searchTerm");

// Bind the search term to the placeholder
$stmt->bindParam(':searchTerm', $searchTerm, PDO::PARAM_STR);

// Execute the query
$stmt->execute();

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

// Display the results
foreach ($results as $result) {
    echo htmlspecialchars($result['name']);
}

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting input validation prepared statements htmlspecialchars

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