What are the best practices for sanitizing user input in PHP to prevent security vulnerabilities?

Sanitizing user input in PHP is crucial for preventing security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. One way to sanitize user input is by using functions like htmlentities() or htmlspecialchars() to encode special characters. Additionally, using prepared statements when interacting with a database can help prevent SQL injection attacks. 

// Sanitize user input using htmlentities()
$userInput = htmlentities($_POST['user_input'], ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

// Using prepared statements to prevent SQL injection
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username");
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $userInput);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

filter_var htmlspecialchars prepared statements SQL injection cross-site scripting

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