What potential issues could arise when using special characters like "." and "/" in regular expressions in PHP?

Special characters like "." and "/" have special meanings in regular expressions in PHP. If these characters are used without proper escaping, they can cause unexpected behavior or errors in the regex pattern. To solve this issue, you can use the preg_quote() function to escape these special characters before using them in your regular expression pattern.

$pattern = '/example.com';
$escaped_pattern = preg_quote($pattern, '/');
// Now you can use $escaped_pattern safely in your regular expression