XSS Prevention

Cross Site Scripting, often known as XSS, is a glaring risk in web security, and PHP also must address it. It occurs when someone is able to insert dangerous code into your site, which can then be executed by users. To prevent XSS in PHP, developers should deploy htmlspecialchars() function to escape potentially harmful characters. This function converts special characters to their HTML entities, reducing risk. For instance, '<' becomes '<'.

Sample PHP code to implement this:

$secure_text = htmlspecialchars($raw_text, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

In this code, $raw_text contains user input that might be risky. By using htmlspecialchars(), $secure_text will now hold a sanitized version of the user input.