What are some best practices for handling referrer information in PHP to ensure accuracy and security?

When handling referrer information in PHP, it is important to validate and sanitize the data to ensure accuracy and security. This can help prevent potential security vulnerabilities such as spoofing or injection attacks. One best practice is to use the $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] variable to access the referrer information and then sanitize it using functions like filter_var() or htmlspecialchars(). 

// Get the referrer information
$referrer = isset($_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']) ? $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER'] : '';

// Sanitize the referrer URL
$referrer = filter_var($referrer, FILTER_SANITIZE_URL);

// Use the sanitized referrer URL in your application
echo "Referrer URL: " . $referrer;

Keywords

referrer information PHP accuracy security

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