How can regular expressions be utilized in PHP to filter out unwanted characters from a string?

Regular expressions can be used in PHP to filter out unwanted characters from a string by using the preg_replace function. This function allows you to specify a pattern to match the unwanted characters and replace them with an empty string. By using regular expressions, you can easily target specific characters or patterns that you want to remove from the string.

$string = "Hello123!@#World";
$filtered_string = preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9]/', '', $string);
echo $filtered_string; // Output: Hello123World