Are there any potential pitfalls to be aware of when replacing special characters in PHP strings?

When replacing special characters in PHP strings, it is important to be aware of potential pitfalls such as accidentally replacing characters that are part of a larger sequence or word. To avoid this, you can use regular expressions with word boundaries to ensure that only the specific characters you want to replace are targeted. 

$string = "Hello, w*rld!";
$replacement = "*";
$pattern = '/\b\*/';
$replaced_string = preg_replace($pattern, $replacement, $string);

echo $replaced_string; // Output: Hello, *rld!

Keywords

htmlspecialchars htmlentities encoding escaping security

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