How can PHP be used to validate and sanitize user input when creating a banner maker with text insertion functionality?

When creating a banner maker with text insertion functionality, it is important to validate and sanitize user input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. This can be done by using PHP functions like `filter_input()` to validate input data and `htmlspecialchars()` to sanitize user-supplied text before displaying it on the webpage.

// Validate and sanitize user input for text insertion
$user_input = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'user_input', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Sanitize user input to prevent XSS attacks
$sanitized_input = htmlspecialchars($user_input, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

// Use the sanitized input in the banner maker
echo "<div class='banner'>$sanitized_input</div>";