What are the best practices for handling form input validation and sanitization in PHP?

When handling form input in PHP, it is crucial to validate and sanitize user input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. To do this, you can use PHP functions like filter_input() for validation and filter_var() for sanitization. It is also recommended to use prepared statements when interacting with a database to further protect against SQL injection. 

// Validate and sanitize form input
$username = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'username', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$email = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'email', FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);

// Use prepared statements to interact with a database
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO users (username, email) VALUES (:username, :email)");
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $username);
$stmt->bindParam(':email', $email);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

form input validation sanitization PHP functions libraries security practices

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