In the context of the forum thread, what best practices should be followed when handling user input in PHP to prevent cross-site scripting attacks and ensure data integrity?

To prevent cross-site scripting attacks and ensure data integrity when handling user input in PHP, it is important to sanitize and validate all user input before using it in any output or database operations. This can be done by using functions like htmlspecialchars() to encode special characters and filter_var() to validate input against specific rules. 

// Sanitize user input to prevent cross-site scripting attacks
$input = $_POST['user_input'];
$clean_input = htmlspecialchars($input, ENT_QUOTES);

// Validate user input to ensure data integrity
if(filter_var($clean_input, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
    // Email is valid, proceed with further processing
} else {
    // Invalid email, handle error accordingly
}

Keywords

input validation htmlspecialchars htmlentities filter_var XSS prevention data sanitization

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