What potential issues can arise when handling special characters like umlauts in PHP when retrieving data from a MySQL database?

Special characters like umlauts can cause encoding issues when retrieving data from a MySQL database in PHP. To solve this problem, you can set the connection character set to UTF-8 and use functions like utf8_encode() or utf8_decode() to handle the encoding and decoding of special characters. 

// Set the connection character set to UTF-8
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8");

// Retrieve data from the database
$result = $mysqli->query("SELECT * FROM table");

// Handle special characters using utf8_encode()
while($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
    $data = utf8_encode($row['column_name']);
    echo $data;
}

Keywords

PHP MySQL special characters umlauts encoding

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