How important is it to ensure that PHP scripts and HTML pages are saved and served in UTF-8 format to maintain consistency and avoid issues with special characters?

It is crucial to save and serve PHP scripts and HTML pages in UTF-8 format to ensure consistency and avoid issues with special characters. This encoding supports a wide range of characters from various languages and symbols, preventing any display errors or garbled text on the website.

header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');