In the context of PHP development, what are the implications of restricting certain characters or symbols in user input fields, particularly for international websites?

Restricting certain characters or symbols in user input fields can lead to issues for international websites as different languages may use characters that are not allowed. To solve this, it's important to allow a wide range of characters while still sanitizing input to prevent malicious code injection.

// Allow a wide range of characters while sanitizing input
$input = $_POST['user_input'];
$clean_input = filter_var($input, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING, FILTER_FLAG_STRIP_LOW | FILTER_FLAG_ENCODE_HIGH);