What potential parsing errors can occur when writing special characters in PHP files?

When writing special characters in PHP files, potential parsing errors can occur if the characters are not properly escaped or encoded. To avoid these errors, it is recommended to use functions like htmlspecialchars() to encode special characters before outputting them to the browser. This ensures that the characters are displayed correctly and do not interfere with the PHP code execution.

$string = "Special characters like <, >, and & need to be encoded before outputting to the browser.";
echo htmlspecialchars($string);