How can debugging techniques be effectively used to troubleshoot PHP scripts that are not producing the expected output, especially when dealing with encoding issues?

When troubleshooting PHP scripts that are not producing the expected output due to encoding issues, it is crucial to use debugging techniques such as printing variables, checking encoding functions, and using encoding conversion functions like `utf8_encode()` and `utf8_decode()`. By carefully examining the input data, output data, and intermediate steps, you can pinpoint where the encoding issue occurs and apply the appropriate fix.

// Example PHP code snippet to troubleshoot encoding issues in a PHP script

// Input data with encoding issue
$input_data = "Mötley Crüe";

// Convert the input data to UTF-8 encoding
$utf8_data = utf8_decode($input_data);

// Output the corrected data
echo $utf8_data;