How does the choice between htmlspecialchars and htmlentities impact the performance and efficiency of PHP code?

When choosing between htmlspecialchars and htmlentities in PHP, the main difference lies in how they handle certain characters. htmlspecialchars only converts a few special characters (<, >, ", ', &) into their respective HTML entities, while htmlentities converts all applicable characters. In terms of performance and efficiency, htmlspecialchars is generally faster because it processes fewer characters. However, if you need to encode all characters for maximum security, htmlentities would be the better choice.

// Using htmlspecialchars for better performance
$encodedString = htmlspecialchars($inputString, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');