What are the potential pitfalls to avoid when working with PHP, MySQL, and forums to ensure proper display of text content?

One potential pitfall to avoid when working with PHP, MySQL, and forums is the improper handling of special characters in text content, which can lead to display issues. To ensure proper display of text content, it is important to use functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape special characters before storing or displaying user input.

// Escaping special characters before displaying text content
$text_content = htmlspecialchars($row['text_content']);
echo $text_content;