What are some best practices for ensuring consistent display of special characters in PHP applications, particularly when dealing with input from external sources like emails?

Special characters can sometimes be displayed incorrectly in PHP applications, especially when dealing with input from external sources like emails. To ensure consistent display of special characters, it is important to set the correct character encoding and use functions like htmlspecialchars() to escape special characters before displaying them on the webpage. 

// Set the correct character encoding
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

// Escape special characters before displaying
$email = $_POST['email'];
$clean_email = htmlspecialchars($email, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

echo $clean_email;

Keywords

htmlspecialchars htmlentities UTF-8 mb_convert_encoding htmlspecialchars_decode

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