What best practices should be followed when handling form submissions in PHP to avoid data manipulation errors?

When handling form submissions in PHP, it is crucial to validate and sanitize user input to prevent data manipulation errors such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. To avoid these issues, always use prepared statements to interact with your database and sanitize user input using functions like htmlspecialchars() or filter_var(). Additionally, consider implementing CSRF tokens to prevent cross-site request forgery attacks. 

// Example of handling form submission in PHP with validation and sanitization

// Validate form input
if ($_SERVER["REQUEST_METHOD"] == "POST") {
    $name = htmlspecialchars($_POST["name"]);
    $email = filter_var($_POST["email"], FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);
    
    // Insert data into database using prepared statements
    $stmt = $pdo->prepare("INSERT INTO users (name, email) VALUES (:name, :email)");
    $stmt->bindParam(':name', $name);
    $stmt->bindParam(':email', $email);
    $stmt->execute();
}

Keywords

SQL injection form validation prepared statements CSRF protection input sanitization

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