What best practices should be followed when including external pages in PHP scripts to avoid complications with anchor tags in the title?

When including external pages in PHP scripts, it is important to properly handle anchor tags in the title to avoid complications. One way to do this is by using the htmlspecialchars() function to escape special characters in the title before displaying it on the page. This will prevent any potential cross-site scripting vulnerabilities that may arise from unescaped HTML tags in the title.

<?php
$title = htmlspecialchars($externalPageTitle);
echo "<title>$title</title>";
?>