What best practices should be followed when creating PHP scripts to avoid issues with special characters in user input?

Special characters in user input can potentially lead to security vulnerabilities like SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. To avoid these issues, it is recommended to sanitize and validate user input before using it in your PHP scripts. One way to achieve this is by using functions like htmlentities() or htmlspecialchars() to encode special characters before displaying user input on a webpage. 

// Sanitize and validate user input
$userInput = $_POST['user_input'];
$cleanInput = htmlspecialchars($userInput);

// Use the sanitized input in your PHP script
echo "User input: " . $cleanInput;

Keywords

htmlspecialchars htmlentities addslashes prepared statements input validation

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