Is it recommended to use a whitelist approach for validating user input in PHP applications to prevent unauthorized access to database queries?

It is recommended to use a whitelist approach for validating user input in PHP applications to prevent unauthorized access to database queries. By only allowing specific, predefined values to be accepted as input, you can mitigate the risk of SQL injection attacks and other security vulnerabilities.

// Example of using a whitelist approach to validate user input
$allowed_values = array("value1", "value2", "value3");

$user_input = $_POST['input'];

if (in_array($user_input, $allowed_values)) {
    // Proceed with the database query using the validated user input
} else {
    // Handle invalid input error
}