What are some best practices for handling variables in PHP to avoid security risks?

One best practice for handling variables in PHP to avoid security risks is to always sanitize and validate user input to prevent SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other vulnerabilities. This can be done using functions like htmlspecialchars() and mysqli_real_escape_string(). Additionally, it's important to use prepared statements when interacting with a database to prevent SQL injection attacks. 

// Sanitize and validate user input
$userInput = $_POST['user_input'];
$cleanInput = htmlspecialchars($userInput);
$escapedInput = mysqli_real_escape_string($connection, $cleanInput);

// Using prepared statements to interact with the database
$stmt = $connection->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = ?");
$stmt->bind_param("s", $escapedInput);
$stmt->execute();
$result = $stmt->get_result();

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting input validation secure coding data sanitization

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