UTF-8 Problem

[atomen]

Hello!

As of my understanding unicode support (utf-8) is enabled by default in xampp (I'm using 1.7.3 xampplite) when you download it.
It is also enabled by default in php (mbstring) since version 5.3.0.

I'm not a hundred percent sure of my statements, so please correct me if I'm incorrect about anything.

Now to the error. I've recently installed xampplite 1.7.3 and everything is working smoothly except unicode characters,
or more specific; characters which aren't in the English alphabet.

With my trial and error it seems like the only thing which can cause an error is within the php settings.

If I write, let's say an 'ö' in my index file (index.php) directly, no errors occurs. The opposite happens if I use the require function (from php) to load my content files.
This is where the errors start. Every single character which isn't from the English alphabet is replaced by an question mark (differs depending on web browsers).

When I check the encoding with Firefox it says utf-8. In my index.php I have <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />.
In my php.ini file I have set default_charset = "utf-8". In httpd.conf I have set AddDefaultCharset utf-8.

After all these corrections without success, I'm asking for you're help. Any kind of help is greatly appreciated!

[Altrea]

does your php-editor save all your files in utf-8, too?
do the outputs come from database-querys?

[atomen]

Hi! Thanks for your answer.

I save all my files (index.php and the php files which are implanted with the require command) with the same editor (dreamweaver in this case) so that is probably not
the error. They are also not from a database query so it has nothing to do with mySQL etc, etc.