What are the best practices for handling UTF-8 encoding in PHP applications?

When working with UTF-8 encoding in PHP applications, it is important to ensure that your files are saved in UTF-8 format, set the character encoding in your HTML meta tags, and use functions like mb_internal_encoding() and mb_convert_encoding() to handle UTF-8 strings properly.

// Set internal character encoding to UTF-8
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');

// Convert a string to UTF-8 encoding
$utf8_string = mb_convert_encoding($string, 'UTF-8', 'auto');