Are there any best practices for handling HTML tags in PHP to prevent security vulnerabilities?

To prevent security vulnerabilities related to HTML tags in PHP, it is important to properly sanitize and validate user input to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. One common best practice is to use functions like htmlspecialchars() or htmlentities() to escape special characters in user input before outputting it to the browser.

// Sanitize user input to prevent XSS attacks
$userInput = '<script>alert("XSS attack!")</script>';
$escapedInput = htmlspecialchars($userInput, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

// Output sanitized input
echo $escapedInput;