Accents in a post?

[Jane77]

When making a post, any kind of accent such as "Merci à tous" screws up the system. This really feels disrespectful to people who speak other languages. Can anyone advise me a procedure to follow to fix this? Any help gratefully appreciated.

[mashby]

UTF-8 Readme
I am thinking you need UTF-8.

[MrPhil]

It all depends on what character set encoding your page is being displayed in, and how members try to enter an accented character. If they're trying to cut and paste something from a Word document or even using the old PC Alt-nnn method, it's likely that the characters won't match up with the page's encoding. If they have a proper keyboard (real or glass), they should be able to enter any accented character that the encoding allows. Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1, the default encoding) is for "Western European" languages, such as French and Spanish (and a few other stray characters from other languages). UTF-8 would let you enter virtually any known accented character in the world, but it means coordinating a changeover of your database, page encoding, and language support files at the same time.