Are there any global settings in IIS8 that can be adjusted to control character encoding for PHP applications, or does this need to be handled within each PHP file individually?

To control character encoding for PHP applications in IIS8, you can adjust the default_charset setting in the php.ini file. This setting specifies the default character set for PHP scripts. By setting it to the desired character encoding, you can ensure consistent encoding across all PHP files without having to handle it individually in each file.

// Set default character encoding to UTF-8 in php.ini
default_charset = "UTF-8"