What are some best practices for handling character encoding in PHP forms?

When handling character encoding in PHP forms, it is important to ensure that the data submitted by users is properly encoded to prevent any issues with special characters or encoding mismatches. One best practice is to set the character encoding of your form to UTF-8 to support a wide range of characters. Additionally, you can use PHP functions like mb_convert_encoding() to convert the input data to the desired encoding.

// Set the character encoding of the form to UTF-8
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

// Convert the input data to UTF-8 encoding
$input_data = $_POST['input_data'];
$input_data_utf8 = mb_convert_encoding($input_data, 'UTF-8', 'auto');