What are some best practices for handling form data validation and submission in PHP scripts?

When handling form data validation and submission in PHP scripts, it is important to sanitize and validate user input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. One common approach is to use PHP functions like filter_var() and htmlspecialchars() to sanitize input data. Additionally, form validation should be performed to ensure that the data meets the required criteria before processing it further.

// Example code snippet for handling form data validation and submission in PHP

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

// Perform form validation
if (empty($name) || empty($email) || empty($message)) {
    echo "Please fill out all required fields.";
} else {
    // Process the form data further (e.g., save to database)
    // Additional code here...
}