What are the best practices for handling PHP code that retrieves and displays dynamic content from external sources like forums?

When handling PHP code that retrieves and displays dynamic content from external sources like forums, it is crucial to sanitize and validate the data to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. One of the best practices is to use functions like htmlentities() or htmlspecialchars() to escape the output before displaying it on the webpage. 

// Sample PHP code snippet to retrieve and display dynamic content from an external source (forum)

// Retrieve content from external source
$content = file_get_contents('https://exampleforum.com/posts');

// Sanitize and validate the content before displaying
$sanitizedContent = htmlspecialchars($content);

// Display the sanitized content on the webpage
echo $sanitizedContent;

Keywords

cURL API data validation error handling security

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