What are the best practices for encoding special characters like umlauts in PHP to avoid errors?

Special characters like umlauts can cause encoding issues in PHP if not handled properly. To avoid errors, it's best practice to use UTF-8 encoding when working with special characters. This can be achieved by setting the appropriate encoding headers and using functions like utf8_encode() or utf8_decode() when necessary. 

// Set UTF-8 encoding headers
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

// Convert special characters to UTF-8 encoding
$umlaut = 'ü';
$encoded_umlaut = utf8_encode($umlaut);

echo $encoded_umlaut;

Keywords

UTF-8 htmlentities htmlspecialchars mb_convert_encoding character encoding

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