Why my page cannot display é, instead, showing �?

Question

I have set page encoding to UTF-8 in HTML:

meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8"

and in HTTP header, I have:

Content-Type    text/html; charset=UTF-8

Why isn't the é shown correctly?

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Update:
The data containing the é is crawled from the Internet; the crawler is written in Microsoft .Net. I used MySQL .Net Connector to connect MySQL.

The page to display the é is written in PHP.

Answer 1

make sure your file does not have a BOM (byte order mark) at its beginning. i had this problem recently, and even though the file was saved as utf8 (checked several times), the BOM confused firefox and it wrongly displayed umlauts (i had html <meta> tags set to the correct encoding and http headers)

Answer 2

You need to add much more information, but a � is usually a sign for a ISO-8859-1 character in data that is treated as UTF-8.

It comes either from

• The source file claiming to be UTF-8, but actually being saved as ISO-8859-1/Windows-8252 - check your file encoding in your editor or IDE

• A database connection that uses ISO-8859-1 even though the database tables are UTF-8

Answer 3

The most likely explanation is that the page is not encoded using UTF-8, so when the browser tries to decode the text, it is doing so using the wrong encoding.

You need to make sure that the actual document encoding matches the claimed encoding