Are there best practices for handling user input in PHP to prevent manipulation and potential security vulnerabilities?

When handling user input in PHP, it is crucial to sanitize and validate the input to prevent manipulation and potential security vulnerabilities. One of the best practices is to use functions like filter_input() or filter_var() to sanitize input and validate it against expected data types or formats. 

$user_input = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'user_input', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
if($user_input === false){
    // Handle invalid input
} else {
    // Proceed with sanitized input
}

Keywords

input validation data sanitization SQL injection cross-site scripting security measures

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