What best practices should be followed when handling form submissions in PHP to ensure data security and prevent vulnerabilities?

When handling form submissions in PHP, it is essential to sanitize and validate user input to prevent SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), and other security vulnerabilities. One best practice is to use prepared statements with parameterized queries to interact with the database securely. Additionally, implementing input validation functions and using built-in PHP functions like htmlspecialchars() to prevent XSS attacks are crucial steps to ensure data security. 

// Example of sanitizing and validating form input in PHP
if ($_SERVER["REQUEST_METHOD"] == "POST") {
    $name = htmlspecialchars($_POST["name"]);
    $email = filter_var($_POST["email"], FILTER_SANITIZE_EMAIL);
    
    // Use prepared statements to insert data into the database
    $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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