Web page shows international characters as � on live site, but it worked on localhost [duplicate]

This question already has answe开发者_如何学运维rs here: Closed 11 years ago.

Possible Duplicate:

Why my page cannot display é, instead, showing � ?

I have following in my html head:

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

but nevertheless my live web page shows the international characters as little squares � or question marks ?.

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copying my answer to the question Why my page cannot display é, instead, showing �

make sure your file does not have a BOM (byte order mark) at its beginning. i had this problem recently, and even though the file was saved as utf8 (checked several times), the BOM confused firefox and it wrongly displayed umlauts (i had html tags set to the correct encoding and http headers)

my website worked fine on localhost too, but broke on my webhost