What is the issue with special characters like ä, ö, and ü in PHP and MySQL databases?

Special characters like ä, ö, and ü can cause issues in PHP and MySQL databases due to character encoding mismatches. To solve this issue, it is important to ensure that both PHP and MySQL are set to use the same character encoding, such as UTF-8.

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

// Set the character encoding for MySQL connection
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "database");
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8");