What are the best practices for persisting user data in PHP applications?

When persisting user data in PHP applications, it is best practice to securely store sensitive information such as passwords using hashing algorithms, sanitize and validate user input to prevent SQL injection attacks, and use prepared statements to interact with databases to prevent SQL injection attacks. 

// Example of securely storing a user's password using password_hash()
$password = 'user_password';
$hashed_password = password_hash($password, PASSWORD_DEFAULT);

// Example of sanitizing and validating user input to prevent SQL injection
$username = $_POST['username'];
$username = filter_var($username, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Example of using prepared statements to interact with a database
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username');
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $username);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

database SQL injection encryption session management data validation

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