I’m using Kohana 3, which has full support for Unicode. I have this as

Question

Editorial Team

Asked: May 14, 20262026-05-14T04:22:38+00:00 2026-05-14T04:22:38+00:00

I’m using Kohana 3, which has full support for Unicode.

I have this as the first child of my <head>

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

The Unicode character I am inserting into is é as in Café.

However, I am getting the triangle with a ? (as in could not decode character).

As far as I can tell in my own code, I am not doing any string manipulation on the text.

In fact, I have placed the accent straight into a view’s PHP file and it is still not working.

I’ve only just started examining PHP’s Unicode limitations, so I could be doing something horribly wrong.

So, how do I display this character? Do I need to resort to the HTML entity?

Update

So this works

Caf<?php echo html_entity_decode('&#233;', ENT_NOQUOTES, 'UTF-8'); ?>

Why does that work? If I copy the output accented e from that script and insert it into my document, it doesn’t work.

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Editorial Team · Answer 1 · 2026-05-14T04:22:38+00:00

Editorial Team

View the http headers. You should see something like

Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

Browsers don’t pay much attention to meta tags, if there was a real http header stating a different encoding.

Whatcha get from this?

echo bin2hex('é');
echo chr(0xc3) . chr(0xa9);

You should get c3a9é, otherwise I’d say file encoding issue.