Is it recommended to use htmlspecialchars, stripslashes, and trim functions in PHP form processing, and if so, in what order should they be applied?

It is recommended to use htmlspecialchars, stripslashes, and trim functions in PHP form processing to prevent XSS attacks, remove unwanted characters, and eliminate leading/trailing whitespaces. The order in which they should be applied is trim first, then stripslashes, and finally htmlspecialchars.

// Example of using trim, stripslashes, and htmlspecialchars in PHP form processing
$name = trim($_POST['name']); // Remove leading/trailing whitespaces
$name = stripslashes($name); // Remove backslashes
$name = htmlspecialchars($name); // Convert special characters to HTML entities