What are the best practices for ensuring data is stored and displayed correctly in UTF-8 format in PHP applications?

When working with UTF-8 data in PHP applications, it is important to ensure that the data is stored and displayed correctly to avoid encoding issues. One way to achieve this is by setting the character encoding to UTF-8 at the beginning of your PHP script using the header function. Additionally, make sure that your database connection is also set to UTF-8 to store and retrieve data properly.

<?php
// Set UTF-8 character encoding for the script
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

// Set UTF-8 character encoding for database connection
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "database");
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8");
?>