Need help with encoding

Alright, I'll try to be brief.

I've done bilingual sites before (french/english) and when I would upload my pages, all special characters in French (like é,è,ê,à, etc) would be replaced by ?'s.

I didn't know what was the problem at that time and thought HTML couldn't handle these accents, so I used to replace all of them with their proper entities.

But I've talked to someone yesterday and realised that HTML can handle French characters and found out that it was the default encoding of my pages that was the problem. If you browse my main site ( http://www.slightlyoutoffocus.com/ ), you will see that the encoding is set to UNICODE (UTF-8) instead of Western (ISO-8859-1) and I have no idea why it is that way.

When I browse a page on my pc, its got the good encoding and when I upload it on my server, it switches to UTF-8. Why is it doing that?

I tried putting the line:

[CODE]< meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" / >[/CODE]

like they suggest HERE but it didn't work and now I'm clueless.

I'd really like to know why is this happening to me and how I can change the default encoding of my pages, cause replacing every characters one by one with an entities is way too long.

I hope someone will take the time to read it all! :(

Can't really figure out what you're saying, hehe... I get that you have problems with showing french thingy's, right ?

I found this using google: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum46/1061.htm

They're talking about setting the charset to "windows-1252" and/or specifiying the "'doze 1252" charset in the headers...

I have no clue to if this helps...But give it a go, never hurts to give a go, now do it ;)

Patric.

Oh...the google search was: http://www.google.se/search?hl=sv&q=charset+%2Bfrench&btnG=Google-s%C3%B6kning&meta=

Thanks for the help Patteman.

I did play with the charset and stuff like that, but didn't quite work. I'll look into what you posted soon enough though!