What is the purpose of the PHP code provided in the forum thread?

The purpose of the PHP code provided in the forum thread is to solve the issue of displaying special characters incorrectly on a webpage. This issue commonly occurs when the webpage is not properly encoding or decoding special characters, resulting in them being displayed as strange symbols or question marks.

// Set the character encoding to UTF-8
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

// Decode special characters using htmlspecialchars function
echo htmlspecialchars($content, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');