How can PHP developers securely handle user input in forms to prevent potential vulnerabilities?

To securely handle user input in forms and prevent potential vulnerabilities, PHP developers should always sanitize and validate the input data before using it in the application. This can be done by using functions like htmlentities() or htmlspecialchars() to prevent cross-site scripting attacks, as well as functions like filter_var() to validate input against specific criteria. 

// Sanitize and validate user input from a form
$name = isset($_POST['name']) ? htmlentities($_POST['name']) : '';
$email = isset($_POST['email']) ? filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) : '';

// Use the sanitized and validated input in the application
if ($email) {
    // Process the user input
} else {
    echo "Invalid email address";
}

Keywords

SQL injection Cross-site scripting (XSS) htmlspecialchars prepared statements input validation

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