What are the best practices for converting Umlaut characters to Punycode in PHP for URLs?

When converting Umlaut characters to Punycode in PHP for URLs, it is important to use the `idn_to_ascii()` function provided by the `intl` extension. This function will properly encode special characters like Umlauts into Punycode for use in URLs. It is recommended to also handle any errors that may occur during the conversion process.

$url = 'https://www.example.com/über';
$punycode_url = idn_to_ascii($url, IDNA_DEFAULT, INTL_IDNA_VARIANT_UTS46);

if($punycode_url === false){
    echo "Error converting Umlaut characters to Punycode";
} else {
    echo $punycode_url;
}