What are the best practices for handling form data in PHP to avoid errors and bugs?

When handling form data in PHP, it is important to sanitize and validate user input to prevent security vulnerabilities and errors. Use functions like htmlspecialchars() to prevent XSS attacks and filter_input() to validate input. Additionally, always use prepared statements when interacting with a database to prevent SQL injection attacks. 

// Sanitize form data using htmlspecialchars()
$name = htmlspecialchars($_POST['name']);
$email = htmlspecialchars($_POST['email']);

// Validate form data using filter_input()
if (filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'email', FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
    // Valid email address
} else {
    // Invalid email address
}

// Use prepared statements when interacting with a database
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO users (name, email) VALUES (:name, :email)");
$stmt->bindParam(':name', $name);
$stmt->bindParam(':email', $email);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

validation sanitization htmlspecialchars error handling data security

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