What are common pitfalls when dealing with character encoding in PHP and MySQL?
Common pitfalls when dealing with character encoding in PHP and MySQL include mismatched character sets between the two, improper handling of special characters, and not setting the appropriate collation for database tables. To solve these issues, ensure that both PHP and MySQL are using the same character encoding (e.g., UTF-8), handle special characters properly using functions like htmlspecialchars(), and set the collation of database tables to utf8mb4_unicode_ci.
// Set character encoding in PHP
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
mb_http_output('UTF-8');
// Set character encoding in MySQL
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "database");
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8mb4");