What are the best practices for securely handling data passed between pages in PHP?

When passing data between pages in PHP, it is important to ensure that the data is secure to prevent any potential security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. One of the best practices for securely handling data passed between pages is to use PHP sessions to store and retrieve sensitive information.

// Start a session
session_start();

// Set the data to be passed securely
$_SESSION['secure_data'] = 'Sensitive information';

// Retrieve the data on the receiving page
$secure_data = $_SESSION['secure_data'];

// Unset the session variable after use
unset($_SESSION['secure_data']);