What are the potential consequences of not properly handling special characters like umlauts in PHP?

If special characters like umlauts are not properly handled in PHP, it can lead to issues such as incorrect display of text, garbled output, or database errors. To solve this issue, you can use functions like utf8_encode() or utf8_decode() to properly handle special characters in PHP.

$string_with_umlauts = "Möglichkeiten";
$encoded_string = utf8_encode($string_with_umlauts);
echo $encoded_string;