What is the recommended way to set the character encoding in PHP applications to avoid encoding issues?
When working with PHP applications, it is recommended to set the character encoding to UTF-8 to avoid encoding issues. This ensures that the application can handle a wide range of characters and special symbols correctly. To set the character encoding in PHP, you can use the header() function to send the appropriate Content-Type header with the charset parameter set to UTF-8.
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');