How to control character enocding in forms so french accents are properly stored

I have a web form that for entering names. Sometimes开发者_StackOverflow社区, the names contain french characters. I am having a problem with, in particular, the é.

When the data is viewed and retrieved, it appears as it should, however, when the CSV is exported and opened in Open Office using UTF-8 encoding, the french character will translate to É or sometimes even È which is completely wrong.

But it's not consistent, it seems that the character will change depending on the method used to input the character (using the ALT+### to enter, versus copy/paste from something).

How do I make the user input consistent so that the output always works?

The end use is a CSV file that Photoshop uses to populate field variables.

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Not sure which platform you are on, but it may be that your CSV export is valid utf-8 that is being read as latin-1, or the other way around.