What are the best practices for handling form submissions in PHP to ensure data security?

When handling form submissions in PHP, it is crucial to sanitize and validate user input to prevent SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other security vulnerabilities. One way to achieve this is by using prepared statements with parameterized queries to interact with the database securely. Additionally, implementing CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) tokens can help prevent unauthorized form submissions. 

// Sample code for handling form submissions securely in PHP

// Sanitize and validate user input
$name = filter_var($_POST['name'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$email = filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);

// Establish a database connection
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase', 'username', 'password');

// Prepare a SQL statement with a parameterized query
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO users (name, email) VALUES (:name, :email)");
$stmt->bindParam(':name', $name);
$stmt->bindParam(':email', $email);

// Execute the query
$stmt->execute();

// Generate and validate CSRF token
session_start();
if ($_POST['csrf_token'] === $_SESSION['csrf_token']) {
    // Process the form submission
    // Redirect or display a success message
} else {
    // Handle CSRF attack
    // Redirect or display an error message
}

Keywords

SQL injection form validation CSRF protection prepared statements data sanitization

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