How can PHP developers ensure that their code does not interfere with HTML tags while implementing word wrapping functionality?

To ensure that PHP code does not interfere with HTML tags while implementing word wrapping functionality, developers can use the `htmlspecialchars()` function to escape any HTML tags in the text before applying word wrapping. This will prevent the HTML tags from being affected by the word wrapping process.

$text = "<p>This is a paragraph with <strong>bold</strong> text that needs word wrapping.</p>";
$wrapped_text = wordwrap(htmlspecialchars($text), 20, "<br>", true);

echo $wrapped_text;