What are the best practices for ensuring valid HTML output when dealing with special characters in PHP?

Special characters in PHP can cause issues with HTML output if not properly handled. To ensure valid HTML output, it is recommended to use PHP's htmlspecialchars function to escape special characters before outputting them to the browser. This function will convert special characters like <, >, ", ', and & into their respective HTML entities, preventing any potential HTML injection attacks. 

&lt;?php
// Example of using htmlspecialchars to ensure valid HTML output
$special_text = &#039;&lt;script&gt;alert(&quot;Hello!&quot;);&lt;/script&gt;&#039;;
echo htmlspecialchars($special_text);
?&gt;

Keywords

htmlspecialchars htmlentities UTF-8 encoding escaping

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