How can special characters, such as umlauts, impact the handling of strings in PHP functions like json_decode?

Special characters, such as umlauts, can impact the handling of strings in PHP functions like json_decode because they may not be properly encoded or decoded. To solve this issue, you can use the utf8_encode() function to encode the string before passing it to json_decode. This ensures that special characters are handled correctly during decoding.

$json_string = '{"name": "Müller"}';
$encoded_string = utf8_encode($json_string);
$data = json_decode($encoded_string, true);
var_dump($data);