title: odd issue with funny characters in Joomla/ Jomsocial
body: <p>I hope someone can help me with this issue. 
  For a few months (since last August) there has been an ongoing issue on my site with strange characters appearing all over the place - especially in user generated content. </p>
  
  <p>I have searched and searched for answers but nothing ever seems to work, although the most pressing (in the blog component) has been resolved by setting JCE to validate HTML - which is does fine in the Blogging component (<a href="http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/authoring-a-content/blog/12630" rel="nofollow">EasyBlog</a>) but doesn't anywhere else (where it is less critical but still an issue). </p>
  
  <p>Here is what I have done so far:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Checked the site from multiple machines, multiple browsers - no difference. </li>
  <li>Checked the MySQL database and table collation - which are <code>utf8_general_ci</code></li>
  <li>Added <code>AddDefaultCharset UTF-8</code> and <code>AddCharset UTF-8</code> .php to the .htaccess files. I played about with these for ages and these two seemed to be the only combination which didn't crash the site. </li>
  <li>Have checked the HTML headers and they definitely have the correct content encoding types (set to <code>UTF-8</code>) </li>
  <li>I have tried different WSIWIG editors to no avail. Besides it is often in the code output where the characters appear - typically a A next to a » </li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I have tried a hack to force the connection script to <code>UTF-8</code> but this causes the site to crash. </p>
  
  <p>If anyone has any ideas at all as to what I can do still ... I'm all ears (please) </p>
  
  <p>Many thanks in advance </p>