How can escaping be effectively utilized in PHP to handle special characters within strings, and when is it necessary to use escaping?

When dealing with strings in PHP that contain special characters, it is necessary to use escaping to ensure the characters are interpreted correctly by the interpreter. Escaping involves adding a backslash before special characters to indicate that they should be treated as literal characters rather than having their special meaning. 

```php
$string = "This is a string with a special character: \"";
echo $string;
```

In this example, the backslash before the double quote ensures that it is treated as a literal character within the string rather than closing the string prematurely.

Keywords

escaping special characters strings PHP functions necessity

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