If you have this problem and your accented characters are being replaced by black diamonds with question marks in them and you tried EVERYTHING you could find and nothing worked and no one seems to know what’s going on and you think it’s PHP or Apache that is causing this issue and you tried changing their configuration directives and you are pulling your hair out then this could be your editor!

Go to it’s preferences, most of them have a section for font encoding, for example in Komodo Edit, go to:

Preferences > Fonts and Colors > Under the Fonts tab > There is the font encoding, choose UTF-8

After this step you might have to change the encoding of the current file, again most editors should be able to do this, refer to your editor’s docs for more info on this, but here is how to do this in Komodo Edit:

Open File > Edit > Current File Settings > In File Settings Box > Change Encoding To UTF-8 > Save

and Voila!