What are the best practices for handling special characters like Unicode 2019 in PHP code to avoid errors and maintain code integrity?

Special characters like Unicode 2019 can cause issues in PHP code if not handled properly. To avoid errors and maintain code integrity, it is recommended to use functions like `mb_convert_encoding()` or `utf8_encode()` to handle special characters and ensure they are properly encoded.

// Example of handling special characters like Unicode 2019 in PHP code
$unicodeString = "\u2019";
$utf8String = json_decode('"' . $unicodeString . '"');
$encodedString = utf8_encode($utf8String);

echo $encodedString; // Output: ’