What are the best practices for handling special characters in PHP scripts to ensure proper display in different environments like web browsers and RSS readers?

Special characters in PHP scripts can sometimes cause display issues in different environments like web browsers and RSS readers. To ensure proper display, it is important to use the correct character encoding and properly escape special characters. One common approach is to use functions like htmlspecialchars() to encode special characters in HTML output. 

// Example of using htmlspecialchars() to handle special characters in PHP
$text = "This is a text with special characters like <, >, and &";
echo htmlspecialchars($text, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

Keywords

htmlspecialchars htmlentities UTF-8 character encoding htmlentities_decode

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