What are the best practices for handling user input in PHP?

When handling user input in PHP, it is important to sanitize and validate the data to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. To do this, you can use functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape special characters and filter_var() to validate input against specific rules. 

// Sanitize user input using htmlspecialchars()
$clean_input = htmlspecialchars($_POST['user_input']);

// Validate user input using filter_var()
$valid_email = filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);
if($valid_email){
    // Email is valid, proceed with further processing
} else {
    // Email is not valid, handle the error accordingly
}

Keywords

validation sanitization htmlspecialchars filter_input prepared statements

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