What are some best practices for efficiently handling and displaying text content from external files in PHP applications?

When handling and displaying text content from external files in PHP applications, it is important to efficiently read the file contents, sanitize the input to prevent security vulnerabilities, and properly display the text content on the web page. One common approach is to use file_get_contents() to read the file contents, htmlspecialchars() to sanitize the input, and echo to display the text content.

// Read the file contents
$file_path = 'external_file.txt';
$file_contents = file_get_contents($file_path);

// Sanitize the input
$sanitized_contents = htmlspecialchars($file_contents);

// Display the text content
echo $sanitized_contents;