What are best practices for handling special characters in PHP across multiple pages or scripts?

Special characters in PHP can cause issues when handling user input or data across multiple pages or scripts. To handle special characters properly, it is recommended to use functions like htmlspecialchars() or htmlentities() to sanitize input and prevent XSS attacks. Additionally, setting the appropriate character encoding using functions like mb_internal_encoding() can help ensure consistent handling of special characters. 

// Set the character encoding
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');

// Sanitize user input using htmlspecialchars()
$user_input = htmlspecialchars($_POST['user_input'], ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

// Display the sanitized input
echo $user_input;

Keywords

htmlspecialchars htmlentities UTF-8 encoding escaping

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