What are some best practices for handling special characters like "<" and ">" in PHP output?

Special characters like "<" and ">" can cause issues when directly outputting HTML in PHP, as they are reserved characters in HTML. To handle these special characters properly, you can use the htmlspecialchars() function in PHP. This function will convert these special characters into their respective HTML entities, preventing any potential security vulnerabilities or rendering issues. 

&lt;?php
// Example of handling special characters in PHP output
$html = &quot;&lt;h1&gt;Hello, World!&lt;/h1&gt;&quot;;
echo htmlspecialchars($html);
?&gt;

Keywords

htmlspecialchars htmlentities escaping XSS security

Related Questions