What potential pitfalls can arise when working with special characters like umlauts in PHP scripts?

When working with special characters like umlauts in PHP scripts, potential pitfalls can arise due to character encoding issues. To ensure proper handling of special characters, it is important to set the correct character encoding in PHP using functions like mb_internal_encoding() and mb_http_output(). Additionally, using functions like mb_convert_encoding() can help convert strings to the desired character encoding. 

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

// Set HTTP output encoding to UTF-8
mb_http_output('UTF-8');

// Convert string to UTF-8 encoding
$umlautString = 'ümläuts';
$utf8String = mb_convert_encoding($umlautString, 'UTF-8', 'UTF-8');
echo $utf8String;

Keywords

UTF-8 htmlentities mb_convert_encoding htmlspecialchars multibyte strings

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