What best practices should PHP developers follow to ensure their scripts are secure and efficient?
To ensure PHP scripts are secure and efficient, developers should follow best practices such as validating user input to prevent SQL injection and cross-site scripting attacks, using parameterized queries when interacting with databases, sanitizing and validating data before processing it, and optimizing code for performance by minimizing database queries and using caching techniques.
// Example of validating user input to prevent SQL injection
$user_input = $_POST['user_input'];
$clean_input = mysqli_real_escape_string($connection, $user_input);
$query = "SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = '$clean_input'";
$result = mysqli_query($connection, $query);
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