What are the best practices for handling special characters like {} in PHP strings?

Special characters like {} in PHP strings can cause issues when not properly handled. To ensure these characters are treated as literals and not as part of PHP syntax, they should be escaped using a backslash (\). This will allow the special characters to be included in the string without causing any syntax errors. Example:

$string = "This is a string with special characters {} that need to be escaped";
echo $string;