In the provided code snippet, what improvements can be made to ensure the proper handling of user input containing special characters like ' ?

Special characters like ' can cause issues when handling user input in PHP, especially when inserting them into a database query. To ensure proper handling of such characters, user input should be sanitized or escaped before being used in a query. This can be done using functions like mysqli_real_escape_string() to prevent SQL injection attacks and ensure the integrity of the data.

// Assuming $input contains the user input
$escaped_input = mysqli_real_escape_string($connection, $input);

// Now $escaped_input can be safely used in a database query
$query = "INSERT INTO table_name (column_name) VALUES ('$escaped_input')";
mysqli_query($connection, $query);