What is the best practice for converting special characters in HTML code using PHP?

When dealing with special characters in HTML code using PHP, it is important to convert them to their respective HTML entities to ensure proper rendering and prevent any potential security vulnerabilities, such as cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. This can be achieved using PHP's htmlentities() function, which converts special characters like <, >, ", ', and & to their corresponding HTML entities.

// Example PHP code to convert special characters in HTML code
$html_code = '<p>This is a <b>bold</b> statement with special characters like & and <.</p>';
$converted_html = htmlentities($html_code);
echo $converted_html;