How to remove HTML special characters from a string in PHP

Use the PHP htmlspecialchars() function

Certain characters such as (&, ", ', <, >) have special significance in HTML, and should be converted to HTML entities. You can use the PHP htmlspecialchars() function to convert special characters in a string to HTML entities. Let's check out an example:

<?php
$my_str = "String with <b>special</b> characters.";
 
// Removing HTML special characters
echo htmlspecialchars($my_str);
?>

If you view the source code of the output you will the string "String with <b>special</b> characters." converted to "String with &lt;b&gt;special&lt;/b&gt; characters."