What are the best practices for handling special characters like quotes and slashes when serializing strings in PHP?

When serializing strings in PHP, special characters like quotes and slashes can cause issues if not properly handled. To ensure these characters are serialized correctly, you can use the `addslashes()` function to escape quotes and slashes before serializing the string. This function will add a backslash before any quotes or slashes in the string, preventing them from interfering with the serialization process.

$string = "This is a string with 'quotes' and /slashes/";
$serialized_string = serialize(addslashes($string));
echo $serialized_string;