How can PHP beginners improve the security of their contact forms to prevent potential exploits?

To improve the security of contact forms and prevent potential exploits, PHP beginners can implement server-side validation to sanitize and validate user input. This involves checking input data for malicious code, restricting input length, and ensuring that data matches expected formats. Additionally, using prepared statements for database queries can help prevent SQL injection attacks. 

// Example of server-side validation for a contact form
$name = filter_var($_POST['name'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$email = filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);
$message = filter_var($_POST['message'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Validate email format
if (!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
    echo "Invalid email format";
    exit;
}

// Process the sanitized data (e.g., send email, save to database)

Keywords

Cross-site scripting SQL injection CSRF protection input validation secure coding practices

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