How can the PHP code provided be used to check and troubleshoot character encoding issues in a PHP application?

Character encoding issues in a PHP application can lead to problems with displaying special characters or text in different languages correctly. To check and troubleshoot these issues, you can use the PHP `mb_detect_encoding` function to detect the encoding of a string and then convert it to the desired encoding using `mb_convert_encoding`.

// Check and troubleshoot character encoding issues
$string = "Some text with special characters āčē";
$detected_encoding = mb_detect_encoding($string, mb_detect_order(), true);

if ($detected_encoding != "UTF-8") {
    $string = mb_convert_encoding($string, "UTF-8", $detected_encoding);
}

echo $string;