How can the presence of quotation marks or apostrophes in the href attribute of an <a> tag affect the functionality of a download link in browsers like Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari?

If quotation marks or apostrophes are present in the href attribute of an <a> tag, it can cause issues with the functionality of a download link in browsers like Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari. To solve this problem, you can use the PHP htmlspecialchars() function to encode the special characters in the URL before outputting it in the href attribute.

&lt;?php
$url = &quot;https://example.com/download?file=example.pdf&quot;;
$urlEncoded = htmlspecialchars($url, ENT_QUOTES, &#039;UTF-8&#039;);
echo &#039;&lt;a href=&quot;&#039; . $urlEncoded . &#039;&quot;&gt;Download File&lt;/a&gt;&#039;;
?&gt;