What are some best practices for securing user input in PHP forms?

Securing user input in PHP forms is crucial to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. One of the best practices is to always sanitize and validate user input before processing it. This can be done by using functions like htmlentities() to encode user input and filter_var() to validate input against specific filters. 

// Example of sanitizing user input
$userInput = "<script>alert('XSS attack');</script>";
$sanitizedInput = htmlentities($userInput);

// Example of validating user input
$email = "invalid_email";
if (filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
    echo "Valid email address";
} else {
    echo "Invalid email address";
}

Keywords

SQL injection XSS attacks input validation prepared statements CSRF protection

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