What are the best practices for handling character encoding in PHP forms when utf-8 is not supported on the server?

When UTF-8 is not supported on the server, a common practice is to convert the input data from the form to a supported character encoding like ISO-8859-1 before processing it in PHP. This can be done using the mb_convert_encoding() function in PHP.

// Convert input data from the form to ISO-8859-1 encoding
$data = mb_convert_encoding($_POST['input_data'], 'ISO-8859-1', 'UTF-8');

// Process the converted data
// For example, you can echo the data back to the user
echo $data;