What is the significance of encoding characters in UTF-8 in PHP applications?

When working with PHP applications, it is important to encode characters in UTF-8 to ensure proper handling of international characters and prevent encoding issues. This is crucial for supporting various languages and character sets in your application.

// Set UTF-8 encoding in PHP
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8');
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');
mb_http_output('UTF-8');