What is the purpose of the function mentioned in the forum thread?

The purpose of the function mentioned in the forum thread is to sanitize user input data to prevent SQL injection attacks. This function helps to escape special characters in the input data before using it in SQL queries, thus making the application more secure.

function sanitize_input($input) {
    // Remove any potentially harmful characters
    $sanitized_input = mysqli_real_escape_string($input);
    
    return $sanitized_input;
}