Converting Uncommon Characters

[Ted S]

I have a big scrolling text field in my FM database where users can store miscellaneous notes pertaining to help desk calls they are working. The Help Desk staff accesses this database using standard FM Pro v8.5. They frequently paste text from many different sources (usually email) into this big note field that they can refer to later on when working similar calls. Everything works fine and has been for years.

Recently I built a PHP web page on our intranet (FM PHP) so non-help desk people can see view the details of a specific help desk call without needing to use the regular Filemaker Pro client application. This is a view only page of one record at a time so it is quite simple. The problem is that when viewed from a browser there are quite a few strange characters in the notes field. Single quotes, double quotes, curly quotes, bullets, etc. are generally are readable from standard FM Pro but when viewed from the browser they get converted into gibberish.

I've tried the HtmlEntities() function to convert them but no luck. Some do get turned into the accepted HTML entity code but then the code just shows in the browser. So instead of displaying an ampersand symbol it shows the ampersand and "amp" and the semicolon.

I'm new to PHP and I have a feeling I'm missing something really simple. Can somebody point me in the right direction?

[Ted S]

I'm not sure I want to break out the champagne quite yet but I did move the ball WAY down the field with this little gem:

Charset UTF-8 is the key. Apparently Filemaker uses a more full-featured character set than the browser normally sees so adding that line to the head section of the web page solves the problem... I think.