What are the potential pitfalls of using special characters like Umlauts in PHP code, and how can they be avoided?

Special characters like Umlauts can cause encoding issues in PHP code, leading to syntax errors or unexpected behavior. To avoid this, it's recommended to use UTF-8 encoding for PHP files and strings containing special characters. 

// Set UTF-8 encoding for PHP files
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

// Use UTF-8 encoding for strings with special characters
$umlaut = 'ü';
echo $umlaut;

Keywords

special characters Umlauts encoding htmlentities validation

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