How can UTF-8 encoding be implemented effectively in PHP to avoid character conversion issues?

When working with UTF-8 encoding in PHP, it's important to ensure that all strings are properly encoded and decoded to avoid character conversion issues. One effective way to handle UTF-8 encoding in PHP is to set the default encoding to UTF-8 using the `mb_internal_encoding()` function. This ensures that all string functions in PHP work with UTF-8 characters correctly.

// Set the default encoding to UTF-8
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');

// Encode a string to UTF-8
$utf8String = mb_convert_encoding($originalString, 'UTF-8');

// Decode a UTF-8 string
$originalString = mb_convert_encoding($utf8String, 'ISO-8859-1', 'UTF-8');