What are the best practices for handling character encoding in MySQL databases when working with PHP?

When working with PHP and MySQL databases, it is important to ensure that character encoding is handled properly to avoid issues with special characters or text encoding. One best practice is to set the character encoding for the database, tables, and connection to UTF-8 to support a wide range of characters. Additionally, when interacting with the database in PHP, it is recommended to set the connection charset to UTF-8 and use functions like utf8_encode() and utf8_decode() to handle encoding and decoding of strings.

// Set the character encoding for the database connection to UTF-8
mysqli_set_charset($connection, 'utf8');

// Use utf8_encode() to encode strings before inserting into the database
$encodedString = utf8_encode($originalString);

// Use utf8_decode() to decode strings retrieved from the database
$decodedString = utf8_decode($encodedString);