What are the advantages of setting the encoding properly in PHP to avoid using HTML entities for special characters?

When encoding is not set properly in PHP, special characters may not be displayed correctly on the webpage, leading to the need to use HTML entities to display them correctly. By setting the encoding properly, you can ensure that special characters are displayed correctly without the need for HTML entities, making your code cleaner and easier to read.

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