What are some best practices for handling special characters like Ä,ö, or Ü in PHP when processing data from external sources like Google?

Special characters like Ä,ö, or Ü can cause encoding issues when processing data from external sources like Google. To handle these characters properly in PHP, it's important to ensure that the data is correctly encoded and decoded using UTF-8 encoding. This can be done by using functions like utf8_encode() and utf8_decode() to convert the data to and from UTF-8 encoding. 

// Example code snippet to handle special characters in PHP
$data = "ÄöÜ"; // Data from external source

// Encode the data to UTF-8
$encoded_data = utf8_encode($data);

// Decode the data back to original encoding
$decoded_data = utf8_decode($encoded_data);

echo $decoded_data; // Output: ÄöÜ

Keywords

UTF-8 htmlentities htmlspecialchars mb_convert_encoding character encoding

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