What are some best practices for handling special characters in PHP?

Special characters in PHP can cause issues with encoding and data integrity. To handle special characters properly, it's best to use functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape characters that have special meaning in HTML, and htmlentities() to convert all applicable characters to HTML entities. This helps prevent XSS attacks and ensures that special characters are displayed correctly on the webpage. 

// Handling special characters in PHP
$special_string = "<script>alert('Hello, world!');</script>";
$escaped_string = htmlspecialchars($special_string, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
echo $escaped_string;

Keywords

htmlspecialchars htmlentities mb_convert_encoding utf8_encode utf8_decode

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