How can PHP developers troubleshoot and resolve issues with variable assignment and special characters disappearing in email content generated with PHP?

Issue: When sending email content generated with PHP, special characters may disappear or not display correctly due to encoding issues. To troubleshoot and resolve this problem, PHP developers can use the `mb_encode_mimeheader()` function to properly encode special characters in email headers.

// Encode special characters in email headers
$subject = 'Subject with special characters';
$subject = mb_encode_mimeheader($subject, 'UTF-8');

// Send email with properly encoded subject
mail('recipient@example.com', $subject, 'Email content with special characters', 'From: sender@example.com');