In PHP, what strategies can be used to control and sanitize user input to prevent security vulnerabilities like injection attacks when displaying data in tooltips?

To prevent security vulnerabilities like injection attacks when displaying data in tooltips, it is important to control and sanitize user input. One strategy is to use PHP's htmlspecialchars() function to escape special characters in the user input before displaying it in tooltips. This helps prevent malicious code from being executed in the tooltip.

// Sanitize user input for tooltip display
$user_input = "<script>alert('XSS attack!');</script>";
$tooltip_content = htmlspecialchars($user_input);

// Display sanitized tooltip content
echo "<div class='tooltip'>$tooltip_content</div>";