What are the best practices for handling special characters like umlauts in PHP output?

Special characters like umlauts can be properly handled in PHP output by ensuring that the correct character encoding is used. The UTF-8 encoding is commonly recommended for handling a wide range of special characters. To ensure that special characters are displayed correctly in PHP output, it is important to set the appropriate content type header and use functions like utf8_encode() or utf8_decode() when necessary.

<?php
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
$text_with_umlaut = 'Möglichkeiten für die Überprüfung von Sonderzeichen wie Umlauten';
echo utf8_encode($text_with_umlaut);
?>