What are the best practices for handling user input and database queries in PHP to prevent data loss or errors?

To prevent data loss or errors when handling user input and database queries in PHP, it is important to properly sanitize user input to prevent SQL injection attacks and validate input data to ensure it meets expected criteria before executing database queries. 

// Sanitize user input to prevent SQL injection
$user_input = mysqli_real_escape_string($connection, $_POST['user_input']);

// Validate input data before executing database queries
if (is_numeric($user_input)) {
    // Execute database query
    $query = "SELECT * FROM table WHERE column = '$user_input'";
    $result = mysqli_query($connection, $query);
    // Process query result
} else {
    echo "Invalid input data";
}

Keywords

SQL injection prepared statements input validation PDO data sanitization

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