What are some best practices for handling form submissions in PHP to avoid potential security risks?

Issue: One common security risk when handling form submissions in PHP is the potential for SQL injection attacks. To avoid this risk, it is important to sanitize and validate user input before using it in database queries. Code snippet:

// Sanitize and validate form input
$username = filter_var($_POST['username'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$email = filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);

// Prepare and execute a safe SQL query using PDO
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO users (username, email) VALUES (:username, :email)");
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $username);
$stmt->bindParam(':email', $email);
$stmt->execute();