What are common challenges when passing form data in PHP applications?

One common challenge when passing form data in PHP applications is properly sanitizing and validating user input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. To solve this, you can use PHP functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape special characters and filter_input() to validate input data.

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

// Escape special characters
$message = htmlspecialchars($_POST['message']);