What are some best practices for handling long text data with special characters in PHP applications to avoid URL encoding issues?

When handling long text data with special characters in PHP applications, it is important to properly encode the data to avoid URL encoding issues. One way to do this is by using the `urlencode()` function to encode the text before passing it in URLs. Additionally, using `htmlspecialchars()` function can help to escape special characters in the text to prevent any security vulnerabilities.

$text = "This is a long text with special characters like & and %";
$encoded_text = urlencode($text);
echo $encoded_text;