What are some best practices for handling form data in PHP to prevent security vulnerabilities?

When handling form data in PHP, it is crucial to sanitize and validate input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. One way to achieve this is by using functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape special characters and filter_var() to validate input against specific criteria. 

// Sanitize and validate form data in PHP
$name = htmlspecialchars($_POST['name']);
$email = filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);
$age = filter_var($_POST['age'], FILTER_VALIDATE_INT);

// Further processing of sanitized and validated data
// ...

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting input validation prepared statements data sanitization

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