What are the best practices for handling user input in PHP scripts to ensure proper functionality and security?

When handling user input 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. One best practice is to always use prepared statements when interacting with databases to prevent SQL injection. Additionally, input should be sanitized using functions like htmlspecialchars() or filter_var() to prevent XSS attacks. 

// Example of validating and sanitizing user input in PHP
$user_input = $_POST['user_input'];

// Validate input
if (filter_var($user_input, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
    // Sanitize input
    $sanitized_input = htmlspecialchars($user_input);

    // Use the sanitized input in your script
    echo "Sanitized input: " . $sanitized_input;
} else {
    echo "Invalid input";
}

Keywords

validation sanitization prepared statements input filtering cross-site scripting

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