I don’t know about you but my fingers get tired of escaping output by typing the long-winded htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8'); over and over again in small PHP projects that don’t need a full-blown framework with automatic output filtering (e.g. CodeIgniter). No matter how small your project is though filtering your output is extremely important so that you prevent malicious users from executing XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) JavaScript code.
So I decided to give my fingers some relief and finally write a short little helper function and share it. See the code and example in the gist below.