What are the potential pitfalls of storing special characters in a database with HTML entities, and how can this be resolved in PHP?

Storing special characters in a database with HTML entities can lead to double encoding issues, where the special characters are encoded twice when retrieved from the database. This can result in displaying the encoded HTML entities instead of the actual special characters on the webpage. To resolve this issue in PHP, you can use the `html_entity_decode()` function to convert HTML entities back to their corresponding special characters before displaying them on the webpage.

// Retrieve data from the database
$data = $row['column_name'];

// Decode HTML entities
$data = html_entity_decode($data);

// Display the data on the webpage
echo $data;