How can PHP beginners ensure that the content from external text files is properly integrated into a website, especially when dealing with character encoding discrepancies?

When integrating content from external text files into a website using PHP, beginners should ensure that they handle character encoding properly to avoid discrepancies. One way to do this is by using the `mb_convert_encoding()` function to convert the content to the desired character encoding before displaying it on the website.

// Read content from external text file
$content = file_get_contents('external_file.txt');

// Convert content to UTF-8 encoding
$content = mb_convert_encoding($content, 'UTF-8', 'auto');

// Display the content on the website
echo $content;