How can PHP be configured to prevent converting special characters to their HTML entities automatically?

By default, PHP automatically converts special characters to their HTML entities for security reasons, which can sometimes be undesired. To prevent this automatic conversion, you can use the `htmlspecialchars()` function with the `ENT_NOQUOTES` flag to disable converting special characters to their HTML entities automatically.

// Disable automatic conversion of special characters to HTML entities
$unescaped_string = htmlspecialchars($your_string, ENT_NOQUOTES);
echo $unescaped_string;