What are common issues when dealing with special characters like Umlauts in PHP programming?

Common issues when dealing with special characters like Umlauts in PHP programming include encoding problems, which can lead to incorrect display or processing of the characters. To solve this, you can use functions like utf8_encode() or utf8_decode() to ensure proper encoding and decoding of the characters.

// Example code snippet to handle special characters like Umlauts
$text = "Möglichkeiten"; // Text with Umlaut
$encoded_text = utf8_encode($text); // Encode the text
$decoded_text = utf8_decode($encoded_text); // Decode the encoded text

echo $decoded_text; // Output: Möglichkeiten