What are the best practices for handling punctuation and special characters when processing text in PHP?

When processing text in PHP, it is important to handle punctuation and special characters properly to avoid unexpected behavior or errors. One common approach is to use functions like `preg_replace()` or `htmlspecialchars()` to sanitize and escape special characters. Additionally, using encoding functions like `utf8_encode()` or `utf8_decode()` can help with handling international characters. 

// Example code snippet for handling punctuation and special characters in PHP
$text = "Hello, world! This is a text with special characters & symbols.";
$sanitized_text = htmlspecialchars($text, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
echo $sanitized_text;

Keywords

PHP text processing special characters punctuation encoding

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