What best practices should be followed when working with character encoding in PHP?

When working with character encoding in PHP, it is important to ensure that all strings are properly encoded and decoded to avoid issues with special characters. One best practice is to use UTF-8 encoding for consistent handling of characters from different languages. Additionally, always set the encoding for your PHP files and database connections to UTF-8 to prevent encoding mismatches. 

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

// Set UTF-8 encoding for database connection
mysqli_set_charset($connection, 'utf8');

Keywords

UTF-8 mb_convert_encoding htmlspecialchars iconv multibyte strings

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