What are the best practices for checking and confirming the character encoding of files in PHP, especially when dealing with XML imports?

When dealing with XML imports in PHP, it is important to check and confirm the character encoding of the files to ensure proper handling of special characters. One way to do this is by using the `mb_detect_encoding()` function to detect the encoding of the file before processing it. This function can help identify the correct encoding and avoid issues with character corruption during XML parsing.

$file_path = 'path/to/your/xml/file.xml';

$encoding = mb_detect_encoding(file_get_contents($file_path), 'UTF-8, ISO-8859-1', true);

if($encoding !== false){
    // Proceed with processing the XML file using the detected encoding
    $xml = simplexml_load_file($file_path, null, LIBXML_NOERROR);
} else {
    // Handle the case where the encoding could not be detected
    echo 'Unable to detect encoding of the file';
}