Are there specific best practices for handling user inputs in PHP to prevent security vulnerabilities?

To prevent security vulnerabilities in PHP when handling user inputs, it is important to sanitize and validate the input data. Sanitizing involves cleaning the input data to remove any potentially harmful characters, while validating involves checking the input against specific criteria to ensure it meets the expected format. 

// Example of sanitizing and validating user input in PHP
$userInput = $_POST['user_input'];

// Sanitize the input data
$sanitizedInput = filter_var($userInput, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Validate the input data
if (preg_match("/^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$/", $sanitizedInput)) {
    // Input is valid, proceed with processing
} else {
    // Input is invalid, handle the error accordingly
}

Keywords

SQL injection Cross-site scripting (XSS) Input validation Sanitization functions Escaping data

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