What are the best practices for handling and validating user input in a PHP script that calculates poker odds?

When handling and validating user input in a PHP script that calculates poker odds, it is important to sanitize and validate the input to prevent any potential security vulnerabilities or errors in the calculations. One way to do this is by using PHP functions like filter_var() to sanitize input and regular expressions to validate it. 

// Sanitize and validate user input for poker odds calculation
$userInput = $_POST['user_input'];

// Sanitize input using filter_var
$sanitizedInput = filter_var($userInput, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Validate input using regular expression
if (preg_match('/^[2-9TJQKA][shdc]$/i', $sanitizedInput)) {
    // Input is valid, continue with calculations
    // Your poker odds calculation code here
} else {
    // Input is not valid, display error message
    echo "Invalid input. Please enter a valid poker hand (e.g. 2h, Ks, Ad).";
}

Keywords

input validation user input PHP script poker odds handling

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