What best practices should be followed when processing form data in PHP to avoid errors and ensure proper functionality?

When processing form data in PHP, it is important to sanitize and validate the input to prevent security vulnerabilities and ensure proper functionality. This can be achieved by using functions like `filter_input()` to sanitize input data and regular expressions or built-in PHP functions for validation. 

// Sanitize and validate form data
$username = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'username', FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$email = filter_input(INPUT_POST, 'email', FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);

if (!$username || !$email) {
    // Handle error, display message or redirect
} else {
    // Process the form data
}

Keywords

validation sanitization htmlspecialchars filter_input error handling

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