Are there any specific PHP functions or libraries that can help mitigate security risks like XSS and SQL injections?

To mitigate security risks like XSS and SQL injections in PHP, it is important to properly sanitize and validate user input. One way to do this is by using PHP functions like htmlspecialchars() to prevent XSS attacks by converting special characters to HTML entities, and prepared statements with parameterized queries to prevent SQL injections.

// Prevent XSS attacks by using htmlspecialchars() function
$unsafe_input = $_POST['user_input'];
$safe_input = htmlspecialchars($unsafe_input, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

// Prevent SQL injections by using prepared statements
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username");
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $safe_input);
$stmt->execute();