How can the issue of character encoding and displaying special characters like umlauts be addressed in PHP scripts, especially when working with Linux environments?

Special characters like umlauts may not display correctly in PHP scripts due to character encoding issues. To address this problem in Linux environments, you can set the character encoding to UTF-8 and use functions like utf8_encode() or utf8_decode() to handle special characters properly.

// Set the character encoding to UTF-8
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

// Example string with umlauts
$string = 'Möglichkeiten für PHP-Skripte';

// Encode the string to UTF-8
$encoded_string = utf8_encode($string);

// Display the encoded string
echo $encoded_string;