Problem with special characters after migrating a web project

Answer 1

I assume you are not using the meta content-type tag in your head element?

Sounds like you'll need to look at the encoding of your old site, and then configure Apache to send the same encoding header.

Inspect the headers to see what is being sent.

Also, for your last point, changing the ...

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

(of course, use the right charset).

... should do it.

Answer 2

Set the correct encoding in your Apache configuration with the AddDefaultCharset (http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/core.html#adddefaultcharset). E.g., for setting UTF-8 encoding to all documents, one would use:

AddDefaultCharset utf-8

However, use this directive carefully. It will set the charset of all documents, so you have to make sure that all these documents are encoded the same. If your documents have different encodings, then don't use this.