What role does character encoding play in preventing text truncation or display issues when retrieving and displaying data from a MySQL table in PHP?

Character encoding plays a crucial role in preventing text truncation or display issues when retrieving and displaying data from a MySQL table in PHP. By ensuring that the character encoding is consistent between the database, PHP, and the web page, you can avoid problems such as garbled text or truncated content. Setting the correct character encoding in PHP using functions like mysqli_set_charset() or setting the meta tag in the HTML header can help resolve these issues.

// Set the character encoding for the MySQL connection
mysqli_set_charset($conn, 'utf8');

// Set the character encoding in the HTML header
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');