What are the potential pitfalls of using special characters like (ß,ä,ö,ü) in PHP when working with databases and PDF generation?

Special characters like (ß,ä,ö,ü) can cause encoding issues when working with databases and PDF generation in PHP. To avoid problems, it's important to properly set the character encoding for both the database connection and when generating PDFs. Use UTF-8 encoding to ensure that special characters are handled correctly in both the database and PDF output. 

// Set UTF-8 encoding for the database connection
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8");

// Set UTF-8 encoding for PDF generation
$pdf->SetFont('Arial', '', 12, '', true);
$pdf->AddPage();
$pdf->Cell(0, 10, 'Special characters like (ß,ä,ö,ü) will be displayed correctly in this PDF', 0, 1);
$pdf->Output('example.pdf', 'D');

Keywords

special characters PHP databases PDF generation encoding errors

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