Why is it important to convert special characters to HTML entities when sending emails with PHP?

Special characters in emails can break the formatting or even be interpreted as malicious code by email clients. To ensure that special characters are displayed correctly, it is important to convert them to HTML entities before sending emails with PHP. This can be done using the htmlentities() function in PHP, which converts special characters to their corresponding HTML entities. 

// Convert special characters to HTML entities before sending email
$message = "Hello, this is a message with special characters like < and >";
$html_message = htmlentities($message);

// Send email with HTML message
$headers = "MIME-Version: 1.0" . "\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-type:text/html;charset=UTF-8" . "\r\n";
mail($to, $subject, $html_message, $headers);

Keywords

PHP special characters HTML entities email security

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