What steps can be taken to troubleshoot and resolve issues with character encoding discrepancies between PHP, database, and form input?

Character encoding discrepancies between PHP, database, and form input can be resolved by ensuring that all components are using the same character encoding, such as UTF-8. This can be done by setting the character encoding in the database connection, specifying the charset in the HTML form, and using functions like mb_convert_encoding() in PHP to handle encoding conversions.

// Set character encoding for database connection
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase;charset=utf8', 'username', 'password');

// Specify charset in HTML form
<form accept-charset="UTF-8">

// Convert encoding in PHP
$input = $_POST['input'];
$input = mb_convert_encoding($input, 'UTF-8', 'auto');