What are some best practices for handling form submissions in PHP to ensure data integrity and security?

Issue: When handling form submissions in PHP, it is important to ensure data integrity and security to prevent vulnerabilities such as SQL injection attacks or cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. One way to achieve this is by using prepared statements and input validation to sanitize user input before processing it. PHP Code Snippet: 

// Connect to the database
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "myDB";

$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}

// Prepare a SQL statement using a prepared statement
$stmt = $conn->prepare("INSERT INTO users (username, email) VALUES (?, ?)");
$stmt->bind_param("ss", $username, $email);

// Validate and sanitize user input
$username = filter_var($_POST['username'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$email = filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);

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

// Close the statement and connection
$stmt->close();
$conn->close();

Keywords

SQL injection form validation prepared statements CSRF protection input sanitization

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