What are the best practices for handling form submissions in PHP to ensure data integrity and prevent manipulation?

To ensure data integrity and prevent manipulation in form submissions in PHP, it is essential to validate and sanitize user input before processing it. This can be achieved by using PHP functions like filter_var() for validation and htmlentities() or htmlspecialchars() for sanitization. Additionally, implementing CSRF tokens and input validation rules can further enhance the security of form submissions. 

// Validate and sanitize form input
$name = filter_var($_POST['name'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$email = filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);
$message = htmlentities($_POST['message']);

// Implement CSRF token verification
if(isset($_POST['csrf_token']) && $_POST['csrf_token'] === $_SESSION['csrf_token']) {
    // Process form submission
    // Your code here
} else {
    // Handle CSRF token validation failure
    echo "CSRF token validation failed.";
}

Keywords

Validation Sanitization Prepared Statements CSRF Protection Input Filtering

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