Are there any best practices for handling user input in PHP scripts to prevent bugs?

When handling user input in PHP scripts, it is essential to sanitize and validate the input to prevent bugs such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. One best practice is to always use prepared statements when interacting with a database to prevent SQL injection. Additionally, you can use functions like htmlspecialchars() to sanitize user input before displaying it on a webpage. 

// Example of using prepared statements to prevent SQL injection
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username');
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $_POST['username']);
$stmt->execute();

// Example of sanitizing user input before displaying it on a webpage
$cleanInput = htmlspecialchars($_POST['input']);
echo $cleanInput;

Keywords

validation sanitization htmlspecialchars filter_input input filtering

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