What are best practices for securely handling user input in QuickEdit features in PHP?

When handling user input in QuickEdit features in PHP, it is important to sanitize and validate the input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. One way to achieve this is by using functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape special characters and strip_tags() to remove HTML tags from the input.

// Sanitize and validate user input in QuickEdit feature
$user_input = $_POST['user_input'];

// Sanitize input to prevent SQL injection and XSS attacks
$sanitized_input = htmlspecialchars(strip_tags($user_input));

// Use $sanitized_input in your application