What are some best practices for handling and displaying external content on a webpage using PHP?

When handling and displaying external content on a webpage using PHP, it is important to sanitize the input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. One way to do this is by using PHP's htmlspecialchars function to escape special characters. Additionally, it is recommended to validate the URL before fetching external content to ensure it is safe to use. 

// Sanitize the input using htmlspecialchars
$externalContent = htmlspecialchars($_GET['external_content']);

// Validate the URL before fetching external content
if (filter_var($externalContent, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL)) {
    // Fetch and display the external content
    echo file_get_contents($externalContent);
} else {
    echo "Invalid URL";
}

Keywords

security validation sanitization cURL XSS

Related Questions