What are common issues with special characters like umlauts when interacting with Microsoft Active Directory using PHP?

Special characters like umlauts can cause issues when interacting with Microsoft Active Directory using PHP because Active Directory expects strings to be in UTF-8 encoding. To ensure proper handling of special characters, you should encode the string using UTF-8 before interacting with Active Directory.

// Encode string using UTF-8 before interacting with Active Directory
$encodedString = mb_convert_encoding($string, 'UTF-8');