How can htmlentities() be used as an alternative to htmlspecialchars() in PHP?

When using htmlspecialchars() in PHP to escape special characters in a string, it may not cover all characters that need to be encoded for HTML output. In such cases, htmlentities() can be used as an alternative as it encodes all characters that have a corresponding HTML entity. This ensures that all special characters are properly encoded for safe output in HTML.

// Using htmlentities() as an alternative to htmlspecialchars()
$string = "<a href='https://www.example.com'>Click here</a>";
$encoded_string = htmlentities($string, ENT_QUOTES);
echo $encoded_string;