In what situations should the utf8_decode function be used when working with file names in PHP?

When working with file names in PHP, the utf8_decode function should be used when dealing with file names that are encoded in UTF-8 and need to be converted to a different character encoding, such as ISO-8859-1. This function can help ensure that file names are displayed correctly and are compatible with various systems that may not support UTF-8 encoding.

// Example usage of utf8_decode to convert UTF-8 encoded file name to ISO-8859-1
$utf8FileName = "example_ñame.txt"; // UTF-8 encoded file name
$decodedFileName = utf8_decode($utf8FileName); // Convert UTF-8 to ISO-8859-1
echo $decodedFileName; // Output: example_ñame.txt