Question

First of all, I’m not a web designer, I’m a programmer, so I’m working a bit out of my knowledge area. However, as the person in my office who has some working knowledge of French, I’m stuck with this issue.

The Problem:
Sharepoint Designer is replacing all French accented characters with the � (square box or diamond-? �) character.

It doesn’t appear to matter if I enter the ‘é’ character as alt-130 (in either design or source or as é

Everything works fine when editing, but when the file is saved and loaded into a browser, it replaces the characters. When reloading into designer, the file shows the 65533 symbol.

EDIT: More info.

1. I use é and save, close SP designer,
2. Reloading SP designer will show the é (instead of the code) in source.
3. Next reload will have replaced it with �

Question 1: (more important) HOW DO I STOP THIS!?
Question 2: (more interesting) Why does this happen?

Charset is iso-8859-1

Answer 1

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

fixed it and stopped sharepoint from modifying the source.