How can the use of htmlentities() function in PHP impact the data being inserted into a MySQL database?

When using the htmlentities() function in PHP to encode special characters in data being inserted into a MySQL database, it can help prevent SQL injection attacks by ensuring that the data is properly escaped. This function converts characters like < and > into their respective HTML entities, which makes it safe to include the data in SQL queries without the risk of malicious code execution.

// Assuming $conn is the database connection and $data is the user input
$data = htmlentities($data);

// Prepare the SQL statement with a parameterized query
$stmt = $conn-&gt;prepare(&quot;INSERT INTO table_name (column_name) VALUES (?)&quot;);
$stmt-&gt;bind_param(&quot;s&quot;, $data);
$stmt-&gt;execute();