What are the best practices for handling character encoding and converting data between different character sets in PHP, especially when dealing with database interactions?

When handling character encoding and converting data between different character sets in PHP, it is important to ensure that all data is properly encoded and decoded to prevent issues with special characters, emojis, or multibyte characters. One way to handle this is by setting the correct character encoding for your database connection and using PHP functions like `mb_convert_encoding()` or `iconv()` to convert data between different character sets.

// Set the character encoding for the database connection
mysqli_set_charset($connection, 'utf8');

// Convert data from one character set to another
$convertedData = mb_convert_encoding($originalData, 'UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1');