incorrectly displaying french characters

Hi All,

I am developing a multilingual site in english and french but am having problems with some of the french characters. (The fact that it is multi-lingual doesnt really have much to do with it I think.)

if you goto http://cust-art.com/fr/node/371 you can see the problem. If you scroll down to the bottom of the page you will see a table with text: Qualité la photo. Except instead of é it is a wierd character (that is different in IE and firefox!). The wierd thing in the same table you can see the word Sépia which is displayed correctly.

The text on the right of the table (e.g. Sépia) comes from custom fields of a flexinode.
The text on the left of the table (e.g. Qualité la photo) comes from the code. I have a function to print text :

function msaText($s) {
   static $msaStrings = array(
	'QualityPhoto' => array("Quality of the Photo", "Qualité de la photo"),
	'Background' => array("Background", "Fond"),
	'Character' => array("Character", "Personnage"),
	'Options' => array("Options", "Options")
   );
   $lang = (i18n_get_lang() == 'fr') ? 1 : 0;
   if (isset($msaStrings[$s][$lang]))
      return $msaStrings[$s][$lang];
}

and then i usually do $content.= msaText('blah'); and eventually print $content;

So the special characters that I print through the print command dont work, the ones from node fields do. Do i need to call a special function before printing?

P.S. if I change the character encoding of my browser from unicode UTF8 to Western ISO then all of the printed chars work but then none of the chars in field nodes work!

any ideas?

cheers,