What are the best practices for processing and storing user input in PHP variables?

When processing and storing user input in PHP variables, it is important to sanitize and validate the input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. One common approach is to use PHP's filter_input() function with appropriate filters to clean the input data. Additionally, using prepared statements when interacting with a database can help prevent SQL injection attacks. 

// Sanitize and validate user input before storing in variables
$username = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'username', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$email = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'email', FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);

// Example of using prepared statements to interact with a database
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO users (username, email) VALUES (:username, :email)");
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $username);
$stmt->bindParam(':email', $email);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

sanitization validation filtering htmlspecialchars prepared statements

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