What best practices should be followed when reading and processing text files in PHP to avoid incorrect results?

When reading and processing text files in PHP, it's important to handle encoding properly to avoid incorrect results. One common issue is reading files with different character encodings, which can lead to garbled text or incorrect data processing. To ensure correct results, always specify the correct encoding when reading text files in PHP.

// Specify the correct encoding when reading text files
$file = 'example.txt';
$contents = file_get_contents($file, false, null, $start, $length, 'UTF-8');