Are there any best practices recommended by the PHP documentation for securing input values?

When dealing with input values in PHP, it is important to sanitize and validate user input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. The PHP documentation recommends using functions like `filter_input()` and `htmlspecialchars()` to sanitize input values and `preg_match()` to validate them.

// Sanitize input value using filter_input()
$input = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'input_field', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Validate input value using preg_match()
if (preg_match("/^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$/", $input)) {
    // Input value is valid
} else {
    // Input value is not valid
}