What are the best practices for handling user inputs in PHP scripts, especially in the context of a guestbook application?

When handling user inputs in PHP scripts, especially in a guestbook application, it is crucial to sanitize and validate the data to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. One way to achieve this is by using PHP functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape special characters and filter_var() to validate input data. 

// Sanitize and validate user input in a guestbook form submission
$name = isset($_POST['name']) ? htmlspecialchars($_POST['name']) : '';
$email = isset($_POST['email']) ? filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) : '';
$message = isset($_POST['message']) ? htmlspecialchars($_POST['message']) : '';

Keywords

validation sanitization htmlspecialchars filter_input SQL injection

Related Questions