What steps should be taken to ensure proper handling of Umlaut characters in PHP scripts after switching to UTF8?

When switching to UTF-8 encoding in PHP scripts, it is important to ensure proper handling of Umlaut characters such as ä, ö, ü, etc. To do this, you should set the internal encoding to UTF-8, use mb_* functions for string manipulation, and make sure your database connection is also set to UTF-8.

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

// Set database connection to UTF-8
$pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=mydatabase', 'username', 'password', array(PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_INIT_COMMAND => "SET NAMES utf8"));

// Example of using mb_* functions for string manipulation
$text = "Möglichkeit";
$length = mb_strlen($text);
echo $length; // Output: 11