How can PHP developers troubleshoot issues related to character encoding when working with external data sources like IRC protocols?

When working with external data sources like IRC protocols, PHP developers can troubleshoot character encoding issues by ensuring that the data is being correctly decoded and encoded using the appropriate character set. They can use functions like `mb_convert_encoding()` or `iconv()` to convert the data to the desired character encoding.

// Example code snippet to convert data from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8
$data = 'Some data from IRC protocol';
$decoded_data = mb_convert_encoding($data, 'UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1');
echo $decoded_data;