What are the potential pitfalls when handling special characters, such as the ampersand symbol, during data conversion in PHP?

When handling special characters like the ampersand symbol in PHP, one potential pitfall is that the symbol can be misinterpreted or encoded incorrectly during data conversion. To prevent this, you can use the htmlspecialchars() function in PHP to convert special characters to HTML entities, ensuring they are displayed correctly in web pages.

$text = "John & Jane";
$encoded_text = htmlspecialchars($text);
echo $encoded_text;