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

Character encoding issues can arise when handling text in PHP files, leading to problems with displaying special characters or symbols. To ensure proper handling of character encoding, it is recommended to set the encoding to UTF-8 in your PHP files. This can be done by adding a meta tag specifying the charset in the HTML output or setting the default_charset configuration option in the php.ini file.

// Set the default character encoding to UTF-8 in PHP
ini_set('default_charset', 'UTF-8');