What are the best practices for handling user input in PHP to prevent errors like unexpected T_VARIABLE?

To prevent errors like unexpected T_VARIABLE in PHP when handling user input, it's essential to properly sanitize and validate the input data before using it in your code. This can be achieved by using functions like filter_input() or htmlentities() to sanitize input and using conditional statements to check for expected data types or values. 

// Example of sanitizing and validating user input to prevent unexpected T_VARIABLE error
$user_input = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'user_input', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

if ($user_input) {
    // Proceed with using the sanitized user input
    echo "User input: " . $user_input;
} else {
    // Handle the case where user input is not valid
    echo "Invalid user input";
}

Keywords

filter_input validation sanitization input validation error handling

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