How does the understanding of escape sequences impact the output of PHP functions like htmlentities?

Understanding escape sequences is crucial when working with PHP functions like htmlentities because certain characters need to be properly escaped to prevent security vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. By using htmlentities with the ENT_QUOTES flag, we can ensure that both double and single quotes are properly escaped, making the output safe for displaying HTML content. 

$text = "<script>alert('XSS attack!');</script>";
$escaped_text = htmlentities($text, ENT_QUOTES);
echo $escaped_text;

Keywords

escape sequences PHP functions htmlentities output impact

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