How can one handle character encoding issues when removing special characters in PHP?

Character encoding issues can be handled by using PHP's `mb_convert_encoding` function to convert the string to a specific encoding before removing special characters. This ensures that the special characters are properly recognized and removed without causing encoding problems.

// Convert string to UTF-8 encoding
$string = mb_convert_encoding($string, 'UTF-8', mb_detect_encoding($string));

// Remove special characters
$clean_string = preg_replace('/[^A-Za-z0-9\-]/', '', $string);