What are some best practices for ensuring that special characters are preserved and processed correctly in PHP scripts?

Special characters in PHP scripts can sometimes be misinterpreted or lost during processing, leading to unexpected behavior or errors. To ensure that special characters are preserved and processed correctly, it is important to set the correct character encoding, sanitize user input, and use functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape special characters before outputting them. 

// Set the correct character encoding
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

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

// Output the sanitized input
echo $clean_input;

Keywords

htmlspecialchars htmlentities utf8_encode utf8_decode mb_convert_encoding

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