How can htmlspecialchars and htmlentities functions in PHP impact the storage and retrieval of text with line breaks in a MySQL database?

When storing text with line breaks in a MySQL database, using htmlspecialchars or htmlentities functions in PHP can encode special characters like <, >, and &. This encoding can affect the formatting of the text when retrieved from the database, as the line breaks may be displayed as HTML entities instead of actual line breaks. To preserve the line breaks, you can use the nl2br function in PHP before storing the text in the database.

// Encode special characters and preserve line breaks before storing in MySQL
$text = nl2br(htmlspecialchars($text));

// Retrieve text from MySQL and decode special characters
$text = htmlspecialchars_decode($text);

// Display the text with preserved line breaks
echo $text;