What are the best practices for handling data input from a form in PHP?

When handling data input from a form in PHP, it is important to sanitize and validate the data to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. One common practice is to use functions like htmlspecialchars() to sanitize user input and filter_var() to validate input against specific criteria such as email or URL format. 

// Sanitize and validate form input
$name = htmlspecialchars($_POST['name']);
$email = filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);

// Check if input is valid
if ($name && $email) {
    // Process the form data
} else {
    // Handle invalid input
}

Keywords

validation sanitization htmlspecialchars filter_input error handling

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