What are the best practices for handling user input and form submissions in PHP scripts?

When handling user input and form submissions in PHP scripts, it is important to sanitize and validate the data to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. To achieve this, use functions like htmlspecialchars() to prevent XSS attacks and prepared statements to prevent SQL injection. Additionally, always validate user input on the server-side before processing it. 

// Sanitize user input using htmlspecialchars()
$name = htmlspecialchars($_POST['name']);
$email = htmlspecialchars($_POST['email']);

// Validate user input on the server-side
if (!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
    echo "Invalid email address";
} else {
    // Process the form submission
    // Insert data into database using prepared statements
}

Keywords

validation sanitization htmlspecialchars filter_input CSRF protection

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