What best practices should be followed when handling form submissions in PHP to ensure data is properly processed and stored?

When handling form submissions in PHP, it is important to sanitize and validate the data to prevent SQL injection and other security vulnerabilities. Additionally, data should be properly escaped before being stored in a database to prevent any potential issues with special characters. Using prepared statements and parameterized queries is also recommended to further enhance security.

// Sanitize and validate form data
$name = filter_var($_POST['name'], FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);
$email = filter_var($_POST['email'], FILTER_VALIDATE_EMAIL);

// Escape data before storing in the database
$name = mysqli_real_escape_string($conn, $name);
$email = mysqli_real_escape_string($conn, $email);

// Prepare and execute a SQL query using prepared statements
$stmt = $conn->prepare("INSERT INTO users (name, email) VALUES (?, ?)");
$stmt->bind_param("ss", $name, $email);
$stmt->execute();
$stmt->close();