What best practices should be followed when handling and processing user input in PHP forms?

When handling and processing user input in PHP forms, it is important to sanitize and validate the data to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. To achieve this, you can use functions like htmlspecialchars() to sanitize input and filter_input() to validate input against a specific type. 

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

// Validate user input against a specific type using filter_input()
$user_input = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'user_input', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

Keywords

validation sanitization htmlspecialchars filter_input CSRF protection

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