What are the recommended functions for sanitizing user inputs in PHP?

Sanitizing user inputs in PHP is essential to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other malicious attacks. Some recommended functions for sanitizing user inputs in PHP include htmlentities() to convert special characters to HTML entities, addslashes() to escape characters that could be used in SQL injection attacks, and filter_var() to validate and sanitize input data. 

// Example of sanitizing user input using htmlentities()
$userInput = "<script>alert('XSS attack!');</script>";
$cleanInput = htmlentities($userInput, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
echo $cleanInput;

Keywords

filter_input filter_var htmlspecialchars htmlentities validation

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