What are some best practices for handling form submissions and processing data in PHP?

When handling form submissions and processing data in PHP, it's important to validate and sanitize user input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. Use PHP functions like filter_input() or htmlentities() to sanitize input data before processing it. Additionally, always use prepared statements when interacting with a database to prevent SQL injection attacks. 

// Example of handling form submission and processing data in PHP

// Validate and sanitize form input
$username = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'username', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$email = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'email', FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);

// Connect to database
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase', 'username', 'password');

// Prepare SQL statement
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO users (username, email) VALUES (:username, :email)");

// Bind parameters
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $username, PDO::PARAM_STR);
$stmt->bindParam(':email', $email, PDO::PARAM_STR);

// Execute the statement
$stmt->execute();

// Display success message
echo "Data submitted successfully!";

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