How can PHP effectively debug issues related to special characters not being written correctly to a text file?

Special characters not being written correctly to a text file in PHP can often be due to encoding issues. To debug this problem, you can try using functions like `utf8_encode()` or `utf8_decode()` to ensure that the special characters are properly encoded before writing to the file. Additionally, checking the file's encoding and setting the appropriate headers can help resolve this issue.

<?php
// Ensure proper encoding of special characters before writing to a text file
$text = "Special characters: é, ü, ñ";
$encoded_text = utf8_encode($text);

$file = fopen("output.txt", "w");
fwrite($file, $encoded_text);
fclose($file);
?>