How can special characters like quotes be properly escaped in PHP strings to avoid errors?

Special characters like quotes can be properly escaped in PHP strings by using the backslash (\) character before the special character. This tells PHP to treat the character as a literal character rather than a special one. For example, to include a double quote within a string, you would escape it like this: \". Example PHP code snippet:

$string = "This is a string with a \"quote\" in it.";
echo $string;