What are best practices for handling UTF-8 characters in PHP strings to avoid formatting errors?

When handling UTF-8 characters in PHP strings, it is important to use multibyte string functions instead of regular string functions to avoid formatting errors. This ensures that the UTF-8 characters are properly encoded and manipulated. One common function to use is `mb_strlen()` instead of `strlen()` to get the length of a UTF-8 string.

// Example of using mb_strlen() to handle UTF-8 characters
$string = "Hello, 你好";
$length = mb_strlen($string, 'UTF-8');
echo $length; // Output: 9