What are the potential consequences of using htmlentities on search terms in PHP?

Using htmlentities on search terms in PHP can potentially lead to incorrect search results or prevent the search functionality from working properly. This is because htmlentities converts special characters into their corresponding HTML entities, which can alter the search query and not match the actual terms in the database. To solve this issue, you can use the htmlspecialchars function instead of htmlentities when displaying user input to prevent XSS attacks without altering the search terms.

$searchTerm = htmlspecialchars($_GET['searchTerm']);
// Use $searchTerm in your search query