Are there any best practices for securely handling user input in PHP forms to prevent vulnerabilities?

When handling user input in PHP forms, it is important to sanitize and validate the input to prevent vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. One way to do this is by using PHP functions like htmlspecialchars() to encode user input and filter_var() to validate input against specific filters. 

// Sanitize user input using htmlspecialchars()
$user_input = htmlspecialchars($_POST['user_input']);

// Validate user input using filter_var()
if (filter_var($user_input, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
    // Input is a valid email address
} else {
    // Input is not a valid email address
}

Keywords

SQL injection Cross-site scripting (XSS) htmlspecialchars prepared statements validation

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