What are some common methods for converting special characters like umlauts in PHP?

When dealing with special characters like umlauts in PHP, a common method is to use the `iconv` function to convert them to their ASCII equivalents. This function allows you to specify the input and output character encoding, making it easy to convert special characters to their standard counterparts.

$string = "Möglichkeiten";
$converted_string = iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', $string);
echo $converted_string;