How can PHP developers effectively handle special characters when manipulating strings in their code?

Special characters in strings can cause issues when manipulating them in PHP code, such as encoding errors or unexpected behavior. To handle special characters effectively, developers should use functions like `htmlspecialchars()` or `htmlentities()` to escape special characters and prevent XSS attacks. Additionally, using `mb_convert_encoding()` can help with encoding-related problems. 

// Example code snippet to handle special characters in PHP strings
$string = "Special characters like <, >, and & need to be escaped";
$escaped_string = htmlspecialchars($string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
echo $escaped_string;

Keywords

htmlspecialchars htmlentities mb_convert_encoding utf8_encode utf8_decode

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