How do I fix bad character interpretation in Google Maps?

I'm building a map of clients for my company and have a .xml file storing all the data which is subsequently loaded into a google map. I have a problem in so much as some of the characters aren't appearing as I expect them to. As far as I've seen so far, the following characters appear to cause issues:

• -
• ø

For example:

<marker lat="0.0" lng="0.0" label="some client">
<infowindow><![CDATA[
    <div class="deployment-info">
        <table>
            <tr>
                <td>Client:</td>
                <td>søme client</td>
            </tr>
            <tr>
                <td>Description:开发者_开发技巧</td>
                <td>"Your product rocks!" <i>- ceo, søme client</i></td>
            </tr>
        </table>
    </div>
    ]]></infowindow>
</marker>

..appears with question marks instead of the offending characters in both firefox and chrome.

Are there some characters I should be using instead or a way of specifying a particular encoding or something?

I believe you should use special characters for HTML. E.g. the euro sign is represented with "€"

This list might help you: http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/sgml/entities.html

And here is another more complete list: http://htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/latin1.html also including your ø