How can the use of SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8' in PHP code help resolve encoding problems when interacting with a database in PHPMyAdmin?

When interacting with a database in PHPMyAdmin, encoding problems may arise if the character set is not properly set to UTF-8. This can result in garbled or incorrectly displayed text. By using the SQL query SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8' in PHP code before interacting with the database, you can ensure that data is stored and retrieved in UTF-8 encoding, resolving any encoding issues.

<?php

// Connect to the database
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "database";

$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Set character set to UTF-8
$conn->query("SET CHARACTER SET 'utf8'");

// Now you can interact with the database without worrying about encoding issues

?>