无法在IE中显示特殊字符

Question

I'm working on a site that has a basic search function to search through products with ajax and display the results along with what was searched for. However, for reasons beyond my understanding, if the search contains any special character (ie. é, è, ê) , the character is replaced with a box. I can't figure out where exactly things are going wrong, and why this is only affecting IE.

The code:

<div class="aux_title"><?php echo htmlspecialchars($this->search_term); ?></div>

The site operates using joomla if that helps/changes anything.

Answer 1

Try setting your charset to UTF-8

<meta charset="utf-8">

Or another charset that better supports your languages. Charsets

Answer 2

I finally found an adequate solution to my peculiar problem.

<?php
    $enc = mb_detect_encoding($this->search_term, mb_detect_order(), true);

    if ($enc != 'UTF-8') {
        $this->search_term = utf8_encode($this->search_term);
    }
?>
<div class="aux_title"><?php echo htmlspecialchars($this->search_term); ?></div>