What are the best practices for handling escape sequences and special characters in PHP strings?

When dealing with escape sequences and special characters in PHP strings, it is important to properly escape them to avoid syntax errors and ensure the correct output. One common way to handle this is by using the backslash (\) character before the special character to escape it. Additionally, PHP provides functions like addslashes() or htmlspecialchars() to handle special characters in strings.

// Example of using addslashes() function to handle special characters in a string
$string = "This is an example of a string with special characters like ' and \"";
$escaped_string = addslashes($string);

echo $escaped_string;