Apache shutdown - Nordic characters in DocumentRoot path

[havardob]

I've downloaded and installed xampp 1.8.3 from zip-folder. I don't want to use a different folder for my localhost than htdocs inside the xampp-folder. When I change the DocumentRoot and Directory inside httpd.conf to

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<Directory "C:/Users/Håvard/">

i get the shutdown error in xampp. However, if I change the DocumentRoot and Directory to

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<Directory "C:/Users/Håvard/">

(OR ANYTHING ELSE BESIDES MY Håvard-USER) it works like a charm. But I need it to be inside of Håvard because I want to have the root in Dropbox.

I have tried the following:

- Restart of xampp
- Reinstalling (and installing of earlier versions)
- Installing apache windows service and running it from the Services-option in the xampp-control panel.
- Checking if the ports are used (borth 80 and 443 are free, I don't have Skype or VMWare as many forums suggest as a solution)
- Changing ports

After 8 hours (!) of researching this thing i've noticed that when I change the path to include norwegian characters, such as 'å' in 'Håvard' it displays the following message inn the prompt window for xampp_start:

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<Directory "C:/Users/H\xe5vard/"> path is invalid

So my quess is that this has something to do with the norwegian character in my username. I have windows 8.1 and my username gets generated from my Microsoft user and I really don't want to change that.

My question is then: How to change the

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<Directory "C:/Users/H\xe5vard/">

to

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<Directory "C:/Users/Håvard/">

Or is this impossible?

[havardob]

Found the solution!

I had to edit the httpd.conf file with Notepad++ and encode it with UTF-8