How should I echo a PHP string variable that contains special characters?

Question

I\'m trying to populate a form with some data that contains special characters (e.g. single quote, double quote,<,>,?,\",\"\".~,,!@#$%^&*()_+}{\":?<<>,./;\'[.]

Answer 1

If you want to display it

echo htmlspecialchars($messge, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

That's what I usually do.

Since the answers are difference:

htmlentities-vs-htmlspecialchars is worth checking out.