What steps can be taken to troubleshoot and fix unexplained characters or symbols appearing in a PHP script output?

Unexplained characters or symbols appearing in a PHP script output can be caused by encoding issues or incorrect character handling. To troubleshoot and fix this issue, you can try setting the correct character encoding, sanitizing input data, and using functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape special characters. 

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

// Sanitize input data
$input = $_POST['input'];
$sanitized_input = filter_var($input, FILTER_SANITIZE_STRING);

// Output sanitized input
echo htmlspecialchars($sanitized_input);

Keywords

UTF-8 encoding htmlspecialchars htmlentities debugging

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