What are some best practices for quoting text in PHP to avoid encoding issues?

When quoting text in PHP to avoid encoding issues, it is best practice to use the `htmlspecialchars()` function to escape special characters in the text. This function converts special characters like <, >, ", ', and & to their HTML entities, preventing any encoding issues that could potentially lead to security vulnerabilities.

$text = "This is a <b>bold</b> statement.";
$quoted_text = htmlspecialchars($text);
echo $quoted_text;