What best practices should PHP developers follow when handling and displaying data retrieved from MySQL in their applications?

When handling and displaying data retrieved from MySQL in PHP applications, developers should always sanitize user input to prevent SQL injection attacks. They should also validate and escape data before displaying it to prevent cross-site scripting attacks. Additionally, developers should use prepared statements and parameterized queries to securely interact with the database. 

// Example of sanitizing user input and using prepared statements in PHP

// Sanitize user input
$user_input = $_POST['user_input'];
$sanitized_input = filter_var($user_input, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Prepare a SQL statement with a placeholder for the user input
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM table WHERE column = :input");

// Bind the sanitized input to the placeholder
$stmt->bindParam(':input', $sanitized_input);

// Execute the prepared statement
$stmt->execute();

// Fetch the results
$results = $stmt->fetchAll();

// Display the data
foreach ($results as $row) {
    echo $row['column_name'];
}

Keywords

SQL injection PDO prepared statements data validation error handling

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