How can the $_POST superglobal be effectively used in PHP to retrieve form data securely?

To securely retrieve form data using the $_POST superglobal in PHP, it is important to sanitize and validate the input data to prevent any potential security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. This can be achieved by using functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape special characters and filter_var() to validate input data. 

// Retrieve form data securely using $_POST superglobal
if ($_SERVER["REQUEST_METHOD"] == "POST") {
    $username = isset($_POST['username']) ? htmlspecialchars($_POST['username']) : '';
    $password = isset($_POST['password']) ? htmlspecialchars($_POST['password']) : '';

    // Validate input data
    if (!empty($username) && !empty($password)) {
        // Process the form data securely
    } else {
        // Handle validation errors
    }
}

Keywords

$_POST superglobal form data security retrieval

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