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

When handling form data in PHP scripts, it is crucial to validate and sanitize the input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. Best practices include using PHP functions like filter_var() for validation and htmlentities() or htmlspecialchars() for sanitization. 

// Validate and sanitize form data
$name = isset($_POST['name']) ? filter_var($_POST['name'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING) : '';
$email = isset($_POST['email']) ? filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) : '';
$message = isset($_POST['message']) ? htmlentities($_POST['message']) : '';

Keywords

filter_var htmlspecialchars validation sanitization input validation

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