How can following the 5 golden rules for UTF-8 in PHP/MySQL and HTML help prevent issues with character encoding in PHP projects?

Character encoding issues can lead to garbled or incorrect display of text on web pages. By following the 5 golden rules for UTF-8 in PHP/MySQL and HTML, you can ensure that your PHP projects handle character encoding correctly, preventing issues with special characters or non-ASCII text.

// Set UTF-8 encoding in PHP
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

// Set UTF-8 encoding in MySQL connection
$mysqli = new mysqli($host, $username, $password, $database);
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8");

// Use htmlspecialchars() to encode special characters in HTML output
echo htmlspecialchars($text, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');