What are some common techniques for handling user input in a PHP form?

When handling user input in a PHP form, it is important to sanitize and validate the data to prevent security vulnerabilities and ensure data integrity. Common techniques include using functions like htmlspecialchars() to sanitize input and regular expressions to validate input against expected patterns. 

// Sanitize user input using htmlspecialchars()
$name = htmlspecialchars($_POST['name']);
$email = htmlspecialchars($_POST['email']);

// Validate email address format using regular expression
if (!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
    echo "Invalid email format";
}

Keywords

Sanitization Validation htmlspecialchars filter_var form submission

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