Are there any best practices for handling special characters and line breaks in PHP when using htmlentities and nl2br?

When using htmlentities and nl2br in PHP to handle special characters and line breaks in text, it is important to apply htmlentities before nl2br. This ensures that special characters are properly encoded before inserting line breaks, preventing any unintended behavior or security vulnerabilities.

$text = "<p>This is a text with special characters like & and line breaks.\nThis is the next line.</p>";
$encoded_text = nl2br(htmlentities($text));
echo $encoded_text;