What steps should be taken when the documentation of a PHP building tool does not provide information on how database connections are established, causing issues with special characters display?

The issue of special characters not displaying correctly in a PHP building tool may be due to improper database connection settings. To solve this issue, you should ensure that the database connection is properly configured to support UTF-8 encoding.

// Database connection settings
$servername = "localhost";
$username = "username";
$password = "password";
$dbname = "database_name";

// Create connection
$conn = new mysqli($servername, $username, $password, $dbname);

// Set UTF-8 encoding
$conn->set_charset("utf8");

// Check connection
if ($conn->connect_error) {
    die("Connection failed: " . $conn->connect_error);
}