What are the best practices for ensuring proper character encoding, such as UTF-8, in PHP web development projects?

Proper character encoding, such as UTF-8, is crucial in PHP web development to ensure that special characters are displayed correctly on the website. To ensure proper character encoding, developers should set the charset meta tag in the HTML head section and also specify the UTF-8 encoding in the HTTP response headers. Additionally, developers should make sure that their database connection and PHP files are also using UTF-8 encoding to avoid any character encoding issues.

// Set the charset meta tag in the HTML head section
echo '<meta charset="UTF-8">';

// Specify UTF-8 encoding in the HTTP response headers
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');

// Set UTF-8 encoding for database connection
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "database");
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8");

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