Are there any recommended best practices for filtering out specific character combinations in PHP strings, such as those starting with "&#", followed by 3 numbers, and ending with ";"?

When filtering out specific character combinations in PHP strings, such as those starting with "&#", followed by 3 numbers, and ending with ";", a regular expression can be used to identify and remove these unwanted patterns. By using the preg_replace() function with the appropriate regex pattern, we can easily filter out these character combinations from the string.

$string = "This is a string with some { unwanted Lj character combinations.";

// Remove character combinations starting with "&#", followed by 3 numbers, and ending with ";"
$filtered_string = preg_replace('/&#\d{3};/', '', $string);

echo $filtered_string;