How should URLs be handled in PHP when used within HTML elements?

When using URLs within HTML elements in PHP, it is important to properly encode the URLs to ensure they are valid and do not break the HTML structure. This can be done using the `urlencode()` function in PHP to encode the URLs before outputting them within HTML elements.

$url = "https://www.example.com/page?query=example";
$encodedUrl = urlencode($url);
echo "<a href='$encodedUrl'>Link</a>";