What are best practices for handling character encoding and conversion in PHP when working with different languages or special characters?

When working with different languages or special characters in PHP, it is important to handle character encoding and conversion properly to ensure that the text is displayed correctly. One best practice is to use the `mb_convert_encoding()` function to convert strings between different encodings. Additionally, setting the correct character encoding in the HTML meta tags can help ensure proper display of special characters. 

// Convert a string from one encoding to another
$string = "Привет, мир!"; // Russian text
$converted_string = mb_convert_encoding($string, 'UTF-8', 'Windows-1251');
echo $converted_string;

// Set the correct character encoding in HTML meta tags
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

Keywords

UTF-8 mb_convert_encoding htmlspecialchars multibyte iconv

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