jQuery Autocomplete with Special Characters (i.e. ö, Ä, é, or ß)

Question

How can I have autocomplete match on words with special characters, such as those in German: ö, Ä, é, or ß. For example, I\'d like \"mun\" to match \"München\" and \"Munchen

Answer 1

I use typeahead, and after hours of banging my head against a wall it was as simple as using utf8_encode on the script that returns the JSON:

utf8_encode(stripslashes($variable));