What is the importance of setting the utf-8 meta in PHP when dealing with character encoding issues?

When dealing with character encoding issues in PHP, setting the utf-8 meta tag is important because it specifies the character encoding of the HTML document. This ensures that special characters and symbols are properly displayed on the webpage, especially when dealing with multilingual content or data from different sources.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
</head>
<body>
    <?php
    // Your PHP code here
    ?>
</body>
</html>