How does ensuring consistent UTF-8 encoding across all files and components in a PHP project contribute to resolving issues related to special character handling?

Ensuring consistent UTF-8 encoding across all files and components in a PHP project helps resolve issues related to special character handling by ensuring that all text is encoded in a uniform manner, preventing encoding mismatches and garbled characters. This approach helps maintain data integrity and ensures that special characters are displayed correctly across different parts of the project.

// Set UTF-8 encoding for PHP
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
mb_http_output('UTF-8');