How can PHP handle special characters, line breaks, and HTML entities in form inputs?

To handle special characters, line breaks, and HTML entities in form inputs, you can use PHP functions like htmlspecialchars() to convert special characters to HTML entities, nl2br() to convert line breaks to <br> tags, and htmlentities() to convert special characters to HTML entities. This helps prevent security vulnerabilities like cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and ensures that user input is displayed correctly on the webpage.

// Handle special characters and HTML entities in form inputs
$name = htmlspecialchars($_POST[&#039;name&#039;]);
$message = nl2br(htmlentities($_POST[&#039;message&#039;]));