How can PHP developers ensure that line breaks and tab spacing are accurately maintained when processing and displaying text content on a website?

To ensure that line breaks and tab spacing are accurately maintained when processing and displaying text content on a website, PHP developers can use the nl2br() function to convert newline characters to HTML line breaks and the htmlentities() function to convert special characters to HTML entities. This will preserve the formatting of the text content and display it correctly on the website.

$text = "This is a text with line breaks\nand tabs\tthat need to be preserved.";
$formatted_text = nl2br(htmlentities($text));
echo $formatted_text;