Why is it important to avoid storing HTML entities in the database when working with special characters in PHP?

When storing HTML entities in the database, it can lead to issues when retrieving and displaying the data. It is better to store the actual special characters in their original form in the database to ensure proper rendering on the frontend. To achieve this, you can use PHP's htmlspecialchars() function to encode special characters before inserting them into the database and decode them using htmlspecialchars_decode() when displaying the data.

// Encode special characters before inserting into the database
$special_text = htmlspecialchars($input_text, ENT_QUOTES);

// Insert $special_text into the database

// Retrieve $special_text from the database
$decoded_text = htmlspecialchars_decode($row['special_text'], ENT_QUOTES);

// Display $decoded_text on the frontend
echo $decoded_text;