In what ways can the SET names utf-8 query be used to resolve character encoding issues in PHP scripts, particularly when interacting with a MySQL database?

When interacting with a MySQL database using PHP scripts, character encoding issues may arise if the database and the PHP script are not using the same character set. To resolve this, you can use the SET names utf-8 query to ensure that both the database and the PHP script are using UTF-8 encoding, which is widely supported and can handle a wide range of characters.

// Establish a connection to the MySQL database
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "database");

// Set the character set to UTF-8
$mysqli->query("SET names utf8");

// Perform your database operations here