Are there any security considerations to keep in mind when reading HTML code into a variable in PHP?

When reading HTML code into a variable in PHP, it is important to be cautious of potential security vulnerabilities such as Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. To mitigate this risk, you should sanitize the HTML code before displaying it to the user. One way to do this is by using the `htmlspecialchars()` function in PHP, which converts special characters to HTML entities.

$htmlCode = "<p>Hello, <script>alert('XSS attack!');</script> World!</p>";
$sanitizedHtml = htmlspecialchars($htmlCode);
echo $sanitizedHtml;