What best practices should be followed when handling form submissions in PHP to ensure proper data type conversion?
When handling form submissions in PHP, it is important to ensure proper data type conversion to prevent security vulnerabilities and data integrity issues. One best practice is to use appropriate functions like intval(), floatval(), or htmlspecialchars() to convert form input data to the desired data type. Additionally, validating user input and sanitizing data before processing it further can help prevent malicious code injections.
// Example code snippet for handling form submissions with proper data type conversion
$name = htmlspecialchars($_POST['name']); // Sanitize input data
$age = intval($_POST['age']); // Convert input data to integer
$price = floatval($_POST['price']); // Convert input data to float