title: How to handle with foreign languages?
body: <p>I'm developing a brazilian website which has to support foreign characters like <code>á, à, ó, í ú, ê, etc</code>. It also uses AJAX so I thought better to use charset <code>UTF-8</code> 'cause I always get the � character and I don't know how to fix this.</p>
  
  <p>My navigation menu appears correctly when using <code>UTF-8</code> (since it's querying the database to render the whole menu), but I don't know how it does. Here are some screenshots of the database and how it renders:
  <img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/F4r1F.png" alt="The database"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/Y13KH.png" alt="alt text"></p>
  
  <p>So far so good. The trouble is that I started using Zend_Navigation for rendering breadcrumbs and I don't know what to do to get over with the � character i'm getting:
  <img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/cd0Xn.png" alt="the breadcrumb"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/WjfmH.png" alt="alt text"></p>
  
  <p>What should I do? Change the charset to ISO-8858-1? I have already done this but it appears everything wrong like this:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/qI1JE.png" alt="alt text"></p>
  
  <h1>EDIT</h1>
  
  <p>In addition, when I change it to <code>miss&amp;atilde;o</code> for example it displays <code>miss&amp;atilde;o</code> instead of <code>missão</code>. Besides, I can't change it manually 'cause it is in the database, I need sort of a function which will handle this</p>
  
  <h1>EDIT 2</h1>
  
  <p>I changed the special character in my database like <code>Ã§Ã£</code> to <code>&amp;ccedil;&amp;atilde;</code> and now the HTML is rendering fine. Although, I'm using the Zend_Navigation for breadcrumb and it's rendering <code>miss&amp;atilde;o</code> instead of <code>missão</code> just like this:</p>
  
  <p><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/9IVW0.png" alt="alt text"> </p>
  
  <p>I also wrote a XML file using Zend_Config_Writer_Xml and I see it printed <code>&lt;label&gt;Informa&amp;#xE7;&amp;#xF5;es&lt;/label&gt;</code> instead of <code>&lt;label&gt;Informações&lt;/label&gt;</code>. Just in case that helps</p>
  
  <p>How should I proceed?</p>