What are the best practices for handling user input in PHP forms?

When handling user input in PHP forms, it is important to sanitize and validate the data to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. To do this, you can use PHP functions like htmlspecialchars() to sanitize input and filter_var() to validate input against specific criteria. 

// Sanitize user input
$clean_input = htmlspecialchars($_POST['user_input']);

// Validate user input
if (filter_var($clean_input, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
    echo "Valid email address: " . $clean_input;
} else {
    echo "Invalid email address";
}

Keywords

validation sanitization htmlspecialchars filter_input CSRF protection

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