HTML Encoding for French characters

I have a email template, that has French copy. If I load this email template up in IE I re开发者_开发知识库ceive square boxes where the accented characters are. How can I combat this? I assume it is down to encoding?

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Ensure the HTML template has the correct meta tag in the header for Content-Type.

You did not specify if the encoding is Latin1, UTF-8 or other - you need to find out first in order to use the right value.

Here is what a UTF-8 meta tag would look like:

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

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Just make sure that the actual encoding of the textfile (I assume it'll be either ISO-8859-1 or UTF-8) is in accordance with the meta tag defining the encoding in the beginning of the file. e.g.:

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

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encodings_in_HTML