What best practice should be followed when handling user input in PHP?

When handling user input in PHP, it is crucial to sanitize and validate the input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. One best practice is to use functions like htmlspecialchars() to sanitize user input and filter_var() to validate input against a specific filter. 

// Sanitize user input using htmlspecialchars()
$sanitized_input = htmlspecialchars($_POST['user_input']);

// Validate user input using filter_var()
$validated_input = filter_var($_POST['user_input'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);

Keywords

filter_input htmlspecialchars validation sanitization security

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