What are some best practices for handling form submissions and displaying user input in PHP to avoid errors and unexpected behavior?

When handling form submissions and displaying user input in PHP, it is important to sanitize and validate the input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. One way to achieve this is by using PHP's built-in functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape special characters and filter_var() to validate input. Additionally, always use prepared statements when interacting with a database to prevent SQL injection. 

// Sanitize and validate user input
$name = isset($_POST['name']) ? htmlspecialchars($_POST['name']) : '';
$email = isset($_POST['email']) ? filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) : '';

// Use prepared statements to interact with the database
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO users (name, email) VALUES (:name, :email)");
$stmt->bindParam(':name', $name);
$stmt->bindParam(':email', $email);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

validation sanitization htmlspecialchars error handling input filtering

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