What are the best practices for handling data encoding when transferring data between different systems, such as Excel VBA and PHP?

When transferring data between different systems, it is important to ensure that the data encoding is consistent to prevent any issues with data corruption or loss. One common practice is to use UTF-8 encoding, which supports a wide range of characters and is widely accepted across different platforms. To handle data encoding between Excel VBA and PHP, you can convert the data to UTF-8 in Excel VBA before transferring it to PHP.

// Convert data to UTF-8 in Excel VBA before transferring to PHP
$data = utf8_encode($data_from_excel_vba);

// Process the data in PHP
// ...