What are the potential pitfalls of not properly handling umlauts in PHP?

Not properly handling umlauts in PHP can lead to issues with text encoding and character display, potentially resulting in garbled or incorrect output. To avoid these pitfalls, it is important to ensure that the proper encoding is set and that functions like utf8_encode() or utf8_decode() are used when working with strings containing umlauts.

// Example code snippet to properly handle umlauts in PHP
$text_with_umlauts = "Möglichkeiten für die Überprüfung von Umlauten";
$encoded_text = utf8_encode($text_with_umlauts);
echo $encoded_text;