What best practices should be followed to ensure proper handling of umlauts in PHP scripts?

To ensure proper handling of umlauts in PHP scripts, it is important to set the correct character encoding, such as UTF-8, at the beginning of the script. Additionally, use functions like `mb_convert_encoding()` or `utf8_encode()` to handle string conversions when working with umlauts.

<?php
// Set the character encoding to UTF-8
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

// Convert umlauts to UTF-8 encoding
$string = "Möglichkeiten";
$utf8_string = mb_convert_encoding($string, 'UTF-8', 'ISO-8859-1');

// Display the converted string
echo $utf8_string;
?>