How can PHP developers ensure that special characters stored in a database are displayed in their normal form when retrieved for output?

Special characters stored in a database can be displayed in their normal form when retrieved for output by using the htmlspecialchars() function in PHP. This function converts special characters to their corresponding HTML entities, ensuring they are displayed correctly on the webpage. 

// Retrieve data from the database
$data = $row['content'];

// Display the data with special characters converted to HTML entities
echo htmlspecialchars($data);

Keywords

PHP special characters database encoding htmlentities

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