What best practices should be followed when handling form data and user input validation in PHP?

When handling form data and user input validation in PHP, it is important to sanitize and validate all input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks. Use PHP functions like filter_var() and htmlspecialchars() to sanitize input and validate it against expected formats using regular expressions or specific validation functions. 

// Example of handling form data and user input validation in PHP

// Sanitize and validate user input
$name = isset($_POST['name']) ? htmlspecialchars($_POST['name']) : '';
$email = isset($_POST['email']) ? filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL) : '';

// Validate input against expected formats
if (!preg_match("/^[a-zA-Z ]*$/", $name)) {
    echo "Invalid name format";
}

if (!$email) {
    echo "Invalid email format";
}

Keywords

Sanitize Validation XSS CSRF Filter_var

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