Character encoding for French Accents

Question

I\'m developing my first website for a French client and I\'m having massive issues with accents being displayed as \"?\".After googling it for days, I thought I understood,

Answer 1

If intérêt shows up as intérêt you likely (i.e. short of corruption due to double encoding) have UTF-8 encoded text being shown up as if it were ISO-8859-1.

Make sure the headers are correctly formed and present the content as being UTF-8 encoded.

Answer 2

First of all, make the charset in the header UTF8 again.

In your page, use utf8_encode() where appropriate to make sure values coming from a database or external files are properly encoded (try to set the encoding of the fields in your database to UTF8 as well)

Also, take a look at the htmlentities() function to parse special characters to html entities which may solve encoding issues as well.

Answer 3

All other languages except French work fine for me by default

In my /fr/messages.php file I was able to resolve this with

'myKey' => utf8_encode('en français'),