What best practices should be followed when implementing user-editable text sections on a PHP website to ensure ease of use and security?

When implementing user-editable text sections on a PHP website, it is important to sanitize user input to prevent malicious code injection and ensure data security. One best practice is to use PHP's htmlspecialchars function to encode user input before displaying it on the webpage. Additionally, it is recommended to limit the length of user input to prevent potential overflow attacks.

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

// Limit the length of user input
if(strlen($user_input) > 255) {
    $user_input = substr($user_input, 0, 255);
}

// Display the sanitized user input
echo $user_input;