What best practices can be implemented to ensure the security and integrity of form data submission in PHP applications?

To ensure the security and integrity of form data submission in PHP applications, it is important to implement measures such as input validation, data sanitization, and protecting against SQL injection attacks. This can be achieved by using functions like filter_var() to validate input data, htmlentities() to sanitize data before outputting it, and prepared statements to prevent SQL injection.

// Input validation using filter_var()
$email = $_POST['email'];
if (!filter_var($email, FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL)) {
    // handle invalid email input
}

// Data sanitization using htmlentities()
$name = htmlentities($_POST['name'], ENT_QUOTES);

// Protecting against SQL injection using prepared statements
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('INSERT INTO users (name, email) VALUES (:name, :email)');
$stmt->bindParam(':name', $name);
$stmt->bindParam(':email', $email);
$stmt->execute();