What are the best practices for handling character encoding and special characters in PHP applications with MySQL databases?

Handling character encoding and special characters in PHP applications with MySQL databases involves setting the correct character set for both the database connection and the HTML output. This ensures that data is stored and displayed correctly, preventing issues such as garbled text or character encoding errors.

// Set the character encoding for the database connection
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8");

// Set the character encoding for HTML output
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');