Are there any security concerns to consider when handling user input in PHP scripts?

When handling user input in PHP scripts, it is essential to sanitize and validate the input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other attacks. One way to address this is by using functions like htmlspecialchars() to encode user input before displaying it on a webpage and prepared statements to prevent SQL injection. 

// Sanitize and validate user input
$userInput = $_POST['user_input'];
$sanitizedInput = htmlspecialchars($userInput);

// Use prepared statements to prevent SQL injection
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username");
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $sanitizedInput);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

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

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