What are some best practices for handling user input and output in PHP to avoid data loss or manipulation?

Issue: To avoid data loss or manipulation when handling user input and output in PHP, it is important to properly sanitize and validate user input before processing it. This can help prevent SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, and other security vulnerabilities. 

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

// Process the sanitized input
if ($username && $email) {
    // Perform necessary operations with the sanitized input
} else {
    // Handle invalid input
}

Keywords

validation sanitization htmlspecialchars prepared statements input filtering

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