What are some best practices for handling and processing external data in PHP scripts?

When handling external data in PHP scripts, it is important to validate and sanitize the input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. One best practice is to use PHP's filter_input function to validate and sanitize external data before using it in your script. 

// Example of validating and sanitizing external data using filter_input

$user_input = filter_input(INPUT_GET, 'user_input', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

if($user_input) {
    // Use the sanitized input in your script
    echo "User input: " . $user_input;
} else {
    // Handle invalid input
    echo "Invalid input";
}

Keywords

input validation data sanitization prepared statements PDO filtering and escaping

Related Questions