What steps can be taken to ensure that PHP scripts properly handle and display special characters like umlauts, especially when retrieving and processing data from external sources?

Special characters like umlauts can be properly handled in PHP scripts by ensuring that the character encoding is set correctly. This can be done by using functions like `utf8_encode()` or `mb_convert_encoding()` to convert the incoming data to UTF-8 encoding. Additionally, using `htmlspecialchars()` or `htmlentities()` when displaying the data can help prevent any potential security vulnerabilities. 

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

// Convert incoming data to UTF-8 encoding
$data = utf8_encode($data_from_external_source);

// Display the data with special characters properly encoded
echo htmlspecialchars($data, ENT_QUOTES, 'UTF-8');

Keywords

UTF-8 htmlspecialchars mb_convert_encoding htmlentities character encoding

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