How dangerous is an ampersand in html output?

Question

HTML

htmlspecialchars replaces "&" with "&"(The toaster is also buggy), but I can't figure out why it's dangerous. Editors (humans) use "& nbsp;", "& mdash;" (Toaster!!) and stuff like that, all the output is of course in htmlspecialchars, or what are alternatives from frameworks, and of course it's all replaced by " " in the text. How is it usually done here?

Answer 1

Not dangerous. htmlspecialchars simply "escaps" the special characters so that when you output "&", "<" and ">" you will see exactly these characters, not converted to tags and special characters.