How can the urlencode function be used in PHP to address the issue of special characters in file names for images?

Special characters in file names for images can cause issues when trying to display or access these images on a website. To address this problem, the `urlencode` function in PHP can be used to encode special characters in the file names. This function will replace special characters with their corresponding ASCII values, making the file names safe to use in URLs.

$filename = "image with spaces & special characters.jpg";
$encoded_filename = urlencode($filename);

echo "<img src='images/$encoded_filename' alt='Image'>";