What are the best practices for handling special characters like accents and symbols when manipulating data in PHP?

Special characters like accents and symbols can cause issues when manipulating data in PHP, especially when working with strings. To handle these characters properly, it's important to use functions that support multibyte character encoding, such as mb_strlen(), mb_substr(), and mb_convert_encoding(). Additionally, setting the correct character encoding for your PHP script and database connection can help ensure that special characters are handled correctly.

// Set the character encoding for the PHP script
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

// Set the character encoding for the database connection
mysqli_set_charset($conn, 'utf8');

// Use mb_* functions to manipulate strings with special characters
$string = 'Café';
$length = mb_strlen($string, 'UTF-8');
$substring = mb_substr($string, 0, 3, 'UTF-8');
$convertedString = mb_convert_encoding($string, 'ASCII', 'UTF-8');