How can developers ensure the accuracy and reliability of their code when extracting content from specific HTML elements using PHP?

When extracting content from specific HTML elements using PHP, developers can ensure accuracy and reliability by using built-in functions like `strip_tags()` to remove any unwanted HTML tags and `htmlspecialchars()` to encode special characters. Additionally, they can use XPath or DOMDocument to target specific elements accurately. Validating the extracted content against expected patterns or formats can also help ensure the data is correct.

$html = '<div><p>This is <strong>bold</strong> text</p></div>';
$doc = new DOMDocument();
$doc->loadHTML($html);

$xpath = new DOMXPath($doc);
$elements = $xpath->query('//div/p');

foreach ($elements as $element) {
    $content = strip_tags($element->nodeValue);
    $cleanContent = htmlspecialchars($content, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
    
    echo $cleanContent;
}