What are best practices for handling user input and submissions in PHP forms?

When handling user input and submissions in PHP forms, it is important to sanitize and validate the data to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. One way to achieve this is by using PHP's filter_input function to sanitize input fields and validate them against specific rules.

// Sanitize and validate user input
$name = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'name', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$email = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'email', FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);

// Check if input is valid
if ($name && $email) {
    // Process the form submission
    echo "Form submitted successfully!";
} else {
    // Handle invalid input
    echo "Invalid input. Please try again.";
}