Are there best practices for handling character encoding in PHP scripts?
Character encoding issues can arise when working with data in PHP scripts, especially when dealing with different character sets or languages. To handle character encoding properly, it is recommended to set the appropriate encoding for input and output, sanitize user input to prevent encoding-related vulnerabilities, and use functions like mb_convert_encoding() or iconv() for converting between different character encodings.
// Set the appropriate character encoding for input and output
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
// Sanitize user input to prevent encoding-related vulnerabilities
$input = htmlspecialchars($_POST['input'], ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');
// Convert between different character encodings if needed
$output = mb_convert_encoding($input, 'ISO-8859-1', 'UTF-8');