What best practices should be followed to efficiently handle URL checking and manipulation in PHP scripts to avoid errors and duplicates?

When handling URL checking and manipulation in PHP scripts, it is important to use built-in functions like `filter_var()` to validate URLs and `parse_url()` to parse and manipulate them. Additionally, keeping track of URLs already processed can help avoid duplicates. Regular expressions can also be used for more complex URL manipulation tasks.

// Validate a URL
$url = "https://www.example.com";
if (filter_var($url, FILTER_VALIDATE_URL)) {
    echo "Valid URL";
} else {
    echo "Invalid URL";
}

// Parse a URL
$parsed_url = parse_url($url);
echo $parsed_url['scheme']; // Output: https
echo $parsed_url['host']; // Output: www.example.com

// Check for duplicates
$processed_urls = [];
if (!in_array($url, $processed_urls)) {
    $processed_urls[] = $url;
}