How can PHP be used to handle special characters like quotation marks in form inputs?

Special characters like quotation marks can cause issues when handling form inputs in PHP, as they can interfere with the code execution or potentially lead to security vulnerabilities like SQL injection attacks. To handle special characters, you can use the `htmlspecialchars()` function in PHP to convert these characters into their respective HTML entities, ensuring that they are safely displayed on the webpage.

// Retrieve form input data
$input = $_POST['input'];

// Sanitize input to handle special characters
$sanitized_input = htmlspecialchars($input, ENT_QUOTES);

// Use the sanitized input in your code
echo "User input: " . $sanitized_input;