By default the server uses ISO-8859-15 characters. This causes the problem that special characters on UTF-8 encoded files won’t show up properly. You can change the encoding of your site by adding .htaccess file to the folder where the site is located.

You can create this file for example with Notepad. File should be named .htaccess and not for example .htaccess.txt. So you can’t add extra file extension to the file. For example in Notepad this means that you have to save the file as All files (Kaikki tiedostot) and not as Text files (Tekstitiedostot).

Add the following lines to the .htaccess file to use UTF-8 charset.

AddCharset UTF-8 .php AddDefaultCharset utf-8