What are the best practices for handling and displaying external content on a website using PHP?

When handling and displaying external content on a website using PHP, it is important to ensure the security of your website and users. One best practice is to sanitize and validate any external content before displaying it to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. Additionally, consider using content security policies (CSP) to restrict the sources from which external content can be loaded. 

// Example of sanitizing and validating external content before displaying
$externalContent = $_GET['external_content'];

// Sanitize the input
$cleanContent = filter_var($externalContent, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Validate the input
if (strlen($cleanContent) > 0) {
    echo $cleanContent;
} else {
    echo "Invalid content";
}

Keywords

security validation sanitization cURL HTMLpurifier

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