What are the best practices for handling form submissions and accessing HTML values in PHP?

When handling form submissions in PHP, it is important to sanitize and validate user input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. To access HTML form values in PHP, you can use the $_POST or $_GET superglobals depending on the form submission method (POST or GET). It is also recommended to use prepared statements when interacting with a database to prevent SQL injection attacks.

// Handle form submission
if ($_SERVER["REQUEST_METHOD"] == "POST") {
    // Sanitize and validate input
    $username = filter_var($_POST["username"], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
    $email = filter_var($_POST["email"], FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);
    
    // Accessing HTML form values
    $username = $_POST["username"];
    $email = $_POST["email"];
    
    // Implementing prepared statements
    $stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO users (username, email) VALUES (:username, :email)");
    $stmt->bindParam(':username', $username);
    $stmt->bindParam(':email', $email);
    $stmt->execute();
}