What best practices can be followed to handle special characters like Umlauts during MySQL dump import in PHP?

Special characters like Umlauts can cause issues during MySQL dump import in PHP if the character encoding is not handled properly. To solve this, set the character encoding to UTF-8 before importing the dump file to ensure that special characters are handled correctly.

// Set character encoding to UTF-8
mysqli_query($connection, "SET NAMES 'utf8'");

// Import MySQL dump file
$dumpFile = 'path/to/dump.sql';
$command = "mysql -u username -p password database_name < $dumpFile";
exec($command);