In PHP, what are some strategies for troubleshooting and debugging issues related to escaping characters and special characters in strings?

When dealing with escaping characters and special characters in strings in PHP, one common issue is not properly escaping special characters like quotes or backslashes. To solve this, you can use functions like addslashes() or htmlspecialchars() to escape these characters before using the string in your code.

// Example of using addslashes() to escape special characters in a string
$string = "This is a string with 'quotes' and backslashes \.";
$escaped_string = addslashes($string);
echo $escaped_string;