What are the best practices for preventing XSS (Cross Site Scripting) attacks in PHP scripts?

XSS (Cross Site Scripting) attacks occur when a website allows malicious scripts to be injected into its pages, potentially compromising user data. To prevent XSS attacks in PHP scripts, it is crucial to sanitize user input and escape output to ensure that any user-generated content is not executed as code. 

// Sanitize user input to prevent XSS attacks
$user_input = htmlspecialchars($_POST['user_input'], ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

// Output the sanitized user input
echo $user_input;

Keywords

htmlspecialchars htmlentities filter_input Content Security Policy input validation

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