Are there specific best practices recommended for encoding special characters in PHP email communication?

When sending emails in PHP, it is important to properly encode special characters to ensure that the email content is displayed correctly to the recipient. One common method is to use the mb_encode_mimeheader() function to encode special characters in the email headers, such as the subject line. This function will handle encoding special characters like non-ASCII characters or symbols according to MIME standards.

$subject = "Subject with special characters é, ü, ñ";
$encoded_subject = mb_encode_mimeheader($subject, 'UTF-8');

// Send email with properly encoded subject
$headers = "From: sender@example.com\r\n";
$headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\r\n";
$headers .= "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\r\n";
$headers .= "Subject: $encoded_subject\r\n";

$body = "Email body with special characters é, ü, ñ";

mail('recipient@example.com', $encoded_subject, $body, $headers);