How does escaping special characters using backslashes (\) in PHP strings prevent parsing errors and ensure proper output?

When special characters are included in a string in PHP, they can cause parsing errors or produce unintended output. To prevent this, we can escape these special characters using backslashes (\). This ensures that the special characters are treated as literal characters and do not interfere with the parsing of the string.

$string = "This is a string with \"special\" characters";
echo $string;