What are the best practices for ensuring proper display of special characters like ä, ö, ü in a PHP application using PDO?

Special characters like ä, ö, ü can sometimes be displayed incorrectly in a PHP application using PDO if the character encoding is not set properly. To ensure proper display of these characters, it's important to set the correct character encoding for the connection to the database. 

// Set the character encoding for the PDO connection
$dsn = 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase;charset=utf8';
$username = 'username';
$password = 'password';

try {
    $pdo = new PDO($dsn, $username, $password);
    $pdo->exec("set names utf8");
} catch (PDOException $e) {
    die("Error connecting to database: " . $e->getMessage());
}

Keywords

PDO character encoding htmlentities UTF-8 htmlspecialchars

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