What are the best practices for handling form submissions in PHP?

When handling form submissions in PHP, it is important to validate user input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. Additionally, it is recommended to sanitize the input data to remove any unwanted characters or tags. Finally, always use prepared statements when interacting with a database to prevent SQL injection.

// Validate and sanitize form input
$name = filter_var($_POST['name'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$email = filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);

// Use prepared statements to insert data into database
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO users (name, email) VALUES (:name, :email)");
$stmt->bindParam(':name', $name);
$stmt->bindParam(':email', $email);
$stmt->execute();