I am building a data import tool for the admin section of a website I am working on. The data is in both French and English, and contains many accented characters. Whenever I attempt to upload a file, parse the data, and store it in my MySQL database, the accents are replaced with '?'. I have text files containing data (charset is iso-8859-1) which I upload to my server using CodeIgniter's file upload library. I then read the file in PHP. My code is similar to this: $this->upload->do_upload() $data = array('upload_data' => $this->upload->data()); $fileHandle = fopen($data['upload_data']['full_path'], "r"); while (($line = fgets($fileHandle)) !== false) { echo $line; } This produces lines with accents replaced with '?'. Everything else is correct. If I download my uploaded file from my server over FTP, the charset is still iso-8850-1, but a diff reveals that the file has changed. However, if I open the file in TextEdit, it displays properly. I attempted to use PHP's stream_encoding method to explicitly set my file stream to iso-8859-1, but my build of PHP does not have the method. After running out of ideas, I tried wrapping my strings in both utf8_encode and utf8_decode. Neither worked. If anyone has any suggestions about things I could try, I would be extremely grateful.