Help needed in choosing a function in PHP

Well i am trying to make XML from database..but one the field has the following value

Noobé

As you can see there is small dash like above 'e'

the output i obtained is Noobe?

I tried to utf8_encode the field but it does not work

I even tried to utf8 in header it did no开发者_C百科t work..

Can u guys suggest me a function by which i can overcome the above problem..

I also have a similar problem regarding a '–' obtained by Microsoft word

Help Appreciated..

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I had a problem with accented characters not long ago. What worked for me was to add this line after my PHP code used to connect to the database :

mysql_query("SET NAMES 'utf8'");

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What is the encoding of the HTML page?

I have a french website that have this in the header:

 <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"/> 

And I can see all é à and others characters.

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The problem is not encoding, as the "é" will become something like "À€". You may have something in you code that remove accents, maybe like http://php.net/manual/fr/function.strtr.php