How can the htmlspecialchars function be used to prevent issues with special characters when reading files in PHP?
When reading files in PHP, special characters can cause issues such as code injection or display problems. To prevent these issues, the htmlspecialchars function can be used to convert special characters to their HTML entities, ensuring that they are displayed correctly and do not interfere with the code.
$file_contents = file_get_contents('example.txt');
$cleaned_contents = htmlspecialchars($file_contents);
echo $cleaned_contents;