What best practices should be followed when handling user input in PHP to ensure data integrity and security in database operations?

When handling user input in PHP, it is crucial to sanitize and validate the data to prevent SQL injection attacks and ensure data integrity. One way to achieve this is by using prepared statements with parameterized queries to securely interact with the database. Additionally, input validation functions like filter_var() can be used to sanitize user input before processing it. 

// Example of using prepared statements to handle user input securely
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase', 'username', 'password');
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('INSERT INTO users (username, email) VALUES (:username, :email)');
$stmt->bindParam(':username', $_POST['username']);
$stmt->bindParam(':email', $_POST['email']);
$stmt->execute();

Keywords

SQL injection data validation prepared statements input sanitization PDO.

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