What are some best practices for handling user input in PHP scripts to prevent errors like unexpected parse errors?

To prevent unexpected parse errors when handling user input in PHP scripts, it is important to properly sanitize and validate the input before using it in your code. One common practice is to use PHP's filter_input function to retrieve user input from GET, POST, or COOKIE variables and validate it against a specific filter. This helps to ensure that the input is in the expected format and does not contain any malicious code that could cause parse errors. 

$user_input = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'user_input', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
if ($user_input === false) {
    // Handle invalid input error
} else {
    // Proceed with using the sanitized user input
}

Keywords

filter_input htmlspecialchars validation error handling syntax error

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