What are some best practices for handling UTF-8 encoding in PHP to avoid issues with special characters like umlauts?

Special characters like umlauts can cause encoding issues in PHP if not handled properly. To avoid problems, it's best to ensure that your PHP files are saved in UTF-8 encoding and that your database connection is also set to UTF-8. Additionally, using functions like utf8_encode() and utf8_decode() can help when working with strings containing special characters. 

// Set UTF-8 encoding for PHP files
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

// Set UTF-8 encoding for database connection
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8");

// Example of using utf8_encode() and utf8_decode()
$utf8_encoded_string = utf8_encode($original_string);
$original_string = utf8_decode($utf8_encoded_string);

Keywords

UTF-8 encoding special characters umlauts PHP functions

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