Are there any best practices for handling special characters like accents in PHP?

Special characters like accents can cause issues when handling strings in PHP, especially when dealing with different character encodings. To properly handle special characters, it is recommended to use functions like `mb_convert_encoding()` to ensure consistent encoding. Additionally, using `htmlspecialchars()` or `htmlentities()` when outputting data to prevent cross-site scripting attacks is a good practice.

// Example code snippet for handling special characters in PHP
$input = "Café";
$converted = mb_convert_encoding($input, 'UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1');
$output = htmlspecialchars($converted, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

echo $output;