What are the best practices for handling form data in PHP scripts for external form submissions?

When handling form data in PHP scripts for external form submissions, it is important to sanitize and validate the input data to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. One way to do this is by using PHP's filter_input() function to sanitize and validate form data before processing it in your script.

// Sanitize and validate form data before processing
$name = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'name', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$email = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'email', FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);

// Check if the form data is valid
if ($name && $email) {
    // Process the form data
    // Your code here
} else {
    // Handle invalid form data
    echo "Invalid form data";
}