What are the best practices for handling template variables in PHP scripts?
When handling template variables in PHP scripts, it is important to properly sanitize and escape user input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting attacks. One of the best practices is to use PHP's htmlspecialchars function to escape any user input before outputting it in the template. This function will convert special characters to HTML entities, ensuring that they are displayed as plain text and not executed as code.
// Example of properly escaping and outputting a template variable
$user_input = "<script>alert('XSS attack!');</script>";
$escaped_input = htmlspecialchars($user_input, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
echo "<p>User input: $escaped_input</p>";