What are some best practices for handling special characters and symbols in PHP code to avoid unexpected output or errors?

Special characters and symbols in PHP code can sometimes lead to unexpected output or errors, especially when dealing with string manipulation or encoding. To handle special characters and symbols properly, it's important to use functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape characters that have special meaning in HTML, or mb_convert_encoding() to convert between different character encodings. Additionally, using the UTF-8 encoding for strings can help ensure consistent handling of special characters across different platforms. 

// Example of using htmlspecialchars() to handle special characters in PHP code
$unsafe_string = '<script>alert("Hello, world!")</script>';
$safe_string = htmlspecialchars($unsafe_string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
echo $safe_string;

Keywords

htmlspecialchars htmlentities UTF-8 encoding validation

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