How can encoding issues, such as with Umlauts, impact the handling of form data in PHP?

Encoding issues, such as with Umlauts, can impact the handling of form data in PHP by causing characters to be displayed incorrectly or not recognized at all. To solve this issue, you can use the `utf8_encode()` function to convert the data to UTF-8 encoding before processing it in your PHP script.

// Convert form data to UTF-8 encoding
if(isset($_POST['input_field'])) {
    $input_data = utf8_encode($_POST['input_field']);
    
    // Process the data further
    // ...
}