How can PHP developers properly sanitize and validate user input data to prevent vulnerabilities like SQL injection when processing form submissions?

To prevent vulnerabilities like SQL injection when processing form submissions, PHP developers should properly sanitize and validate user input data. This can be done by using functions like htmlspecialchars() to sanitize input and prepared statements to prevent SQL injection attacks.

// Sanitize user input data
$user_input = htmlspecialchars($_POST['user_input']);

// Validate user input data
if (!empty($user_input)) {
    // Process the form submission with prepared statements to prevent SQL injection
    $stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO table_name (column_name) VALUES (:user_input)");
    $stmt->bindParam(':user_input', $user_input);
    $stmt->execute();
}