In the provided code examples, what are some best practices for handling and outputting HTML content in PHP variables to avoid unexpected behavior or errors?
When outputting HTML content stored in PHP variables, it's important to properly escape the content to prevent cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks and ensure the HTML is rendered correctly. One way to do this is by using the htmlspecialchars() function to encode special characters in the HTML content.
// Example of properly escaping HTML content in a PHP variable
$htmlContent = "<h1>Welcome to my website!</h1>";
echo htmlspecialchars($htmlContent);