How can regular expressions be utilized in PHP to ensure proper handling of special characters in user-generated content?

When dealing with user-generated content in PHP, special characters can cause issues such as SQL injection or XSS attacks if not properly handled. Regular expressions can be used to sanitize and escape these special characters to ensure the security of the application. 

$userInput = $_POST['user_input'];

// Remove special characters using regular expressions
$sanitizedInput = preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9]/', '', $userInput);

// Now $sanitizedInput can be safely used in the application

Keywords

Regular expressions PHP special characters user-generated content handling.

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