renaming my files from .htm to .php screws up the character encoding..?

I was given the job to work in the SEO of a website that is entirely html and javascript. First thing I see, they have hardcoded the headers and the footers(which I want to edit) on every page.

I decided that I want to change all the .htm files t开发者_运维知识库o .php in order to take advantage of the php include function and to include the header and the footer as a separate file into every page(yes I know that I could've modify the .htaccess file to treat .htm files as .php but there is a couple of more reasons I wanted .php).

After the change, the special characters on the website started showing as question marks on black background or simply as a normal question mark. When I open the .php files from the cPanel of my host, i see at the top of the editor that encoding is UTF-8 so I don't understand what the problem is. What I do to fix this problem is some kind of "magic" that I hate and it doesn't always work from the first time - copy the code in the whole file, change the encoding to us-ascii, save(at this point the file becomes empty o.O), CLOSE, open back up, paste the code back, tell the editor to open it as utf-8(it creates a new file...), paste the code back in. Then the special characters(like cyrilic, etc.) are displayed properly.

I don't want to do this for as many pages are on the website plus I want to understand the proper way to do it. Anyone can provide any help?

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The files encoding must match the charset declared by the HTTP header and the meta tags of your HTML files.

Do you have something like this in your HTML:

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

When you inspect the HTTP headers with Firebug (or anything else) do you see something like this (watch for "Content-Type"):

Response Headers
Date              Thu, 22 Sep 2011 14:53:26 GMT
Server            Apache mod_fcgid/2.3.6 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635
Expires           Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
Cache-Control     private, max-age=10800, pre-check=10800
Content-Language  EN
Last-Modified     Fri, 22 Jul 2011 13:22:29 GMT
Content-Type      text/html; charset=UTF-8

When you open the file in your editor and you check it's charset, is it the same as above? Make sur that if you use UTF-8, no BOM are added to your files (at least for PHP files).

I guess your editor messed thing up... Can you provide the URL to an actual page? It could help us to tell what's is exactly going on.