What are the potential pitfalls of not specifying the character encoding in a PDO connection in PHP?

If the character encoding is not specified in a PDO connection in PHP, it can lead to unexpected behavior and data corruption when handling non-ASCII characters. To solve this issue, it is important to specify the character encoding in the PDO connection using the `charset` parameter, such as `charset=utf8`. 

$dsn = 'mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase;charset=utf8';
$username = 'username';
$password = 'password';

try {
    $pdo = new PDO($dsn, $username, $password);
    // Other PDO configurations and operations
} catch (PDOException $e) {
    echo 'Connection failed: ' . $e->getMessage();
}

Keywords

PDO character encoding connection PHP pitfalls

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