What are the best practices for setting the charset in PHP headers to handle special characters effectively?

Special characters can be properly handled in PHP by setting the charset in the headers to ensure that the browser interprets the content correctly. The recommended charset for handling special characters effectively is UTF-8. By setting the charset to UTF-8 in the headers, you can avoid issues with displaying special characters incorrectly on your web pages.

<?php
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
?>