What steps can be taken to troubleshoot and fix character encoding issues in PHP and MySQL?

Character encoding issues in PHP and MySQL can often be resolved by ensuring that both systems are set to use the same character encoding, such as UTF-8. To troubleshoot and fix these issues, you can check the character encoding settings in your PHP files, database tables, and connection settings. Additionally, you can use PHP functions like utf8_encode() and utf8_decode() to convert strings to UTF-8 encoding when needed.

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

// Set the character encoding for MySQL connection
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "username", "password", "database");
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8");

// Convert string to UTF-8 encoding
$utf8_string = utf8_encode($original_string);