How can user inputs be saved and output exactly as entered without compromising security in PHP?

When saving user inputs in PHP, it is important to sanitize and validate the data to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. To save user inputs exactly as entered without compromising security, you can use prepared statements for database queries and htmlentities function to encode special characters before displaying the data. 

// Sanitize and save user input to database
$input = $_POST['user_input'];
$clean_input = htmlentities($input);

$stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO table_name (user_input) VALUES (:input)");
$stmt->bindParam(':input', $clean_input);
$stmt->execute();

// Output saved user input exactly as entered
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT user_input FROM table_name WHERE id = :id");
$stmt->bindParam(':id', $id);
$stmt->execute();
$row = $stmt->fetch();
echo $row['user_input'];

Keywords

user input security PHP htmlspecialchars validation

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