What are best practices for handling user input in PHP?

When handling user input in PHP, it is important to sanitize and validate the data to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. One way to do this is by using PHP's filter_input function to filter input data.

// Sanitize and validate user input using filter_input function
$username = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'username', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$email = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'email', FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);
$password = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'password', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Check if input is valid
if ($username && $email && $password) {
    // Process the input data
    // ...
} else {
    // Handle invalid input
    // ...
}