file_get_contents() Breaks Up UTF-8 Characters

The file_get_contents() function in PHP is used to read the contents of a file into a string. It reads raw bytes correctly, so files already encoded in UTF-8 are handled without issues. However, problems can occur if the source file uses a different character encoding (such as ISO-8859-1 or Windows-1252) while your application expects UTF-8. To resolve this, you can convert the file contents to UTF-8 after reading.

Example of converting file contents to UTF-8 in PHP

or

Example of specifying source encoding in PHP