What are best practices for handling and processing HTML content in PHP?

When handling and processing HTML content in PHP, it is important to properly sanitize and validate the input to prevent security vulnerabilities such as cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. One way to achieve this is by using functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape special characters and strip_tags() to remove any potentially harmful HTML tags from the input.

// Example of sanitizing HTML content in PHP
$htmlContent = "<p>Hello, <script>alert('XSS');</script>World!</p>";
$sanitizedContent = htmlspecialchars($htmlContent, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
echo $sanitizedContent;