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

When handling user input forms in PHP, it is crucial to sanitize and validate the data to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. One best practice is to use PHP's built-in functions like htmlspecialchars() and mysqli_real_escape_string() to sanitize input data before using it in queries or displaying it on the webpage. 

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

// Validate user input using mysqli_real_escape_string()
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "database");
$userInput = $mysqli->real_escape_string($_POST['user_input']);

// Use the sanitized and validated user input in your PHP code
// For example, insert into database
$query = "INSERT INTO table_name (column_name) VALUES ('$userInput')";
$mysqli->query($query);

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting form validation htmlspecialchars prepared statements

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