What is the significance of setting the internal encoding to UTF-8 in PHP scripts when dealing with multibyte characters?

Setting the internal encoding to UTF-8 in PHP scripts is significant when dealing with multibyte characters because it ensures that PHP functions correctly handle and process characters from various languages and character sets. This is important for applications that need to support internationalization and multilingual content.

// Set the internal encoding to UTF-8
mb_internal_encoding('UTF-8');