# Major special characters issue

**URL:** https://forum.kirupa.com/t/major-special-characters-issue/194589
**Category:** Uncategorized
**Created:** [July 24, 2006, 7:20pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/major-special-characters-issue/194589 "2006-07-24T19:20:22Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![catia](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/7993a0/32.png) [@catia](https://forum.kirupa.com/u/catia)
#### Post date: [July 24, 2006, 7:20pm UTC](https://forum.kirupa.com/t/major-special-characters-issue/194589/1 "2006-07-24T19:20:22Z")

</div>

Hello all,

I need to display special characters (more specifically, french accented letters) that are being loaded into Flash from an xml file. I tried a number of “tricks” that are supposed to make these characters visible, but I still cannot see them.

To sum up:

1. I have put this tag at the beginning of my xml file:

```auto
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

```

1. I am using notepad to save my xml files in a utf-8 encoding
2. I put this comment at the beginning of the first frame of the scene where the characters should be displayed:

```auto
//!-- UTF-8

```

1. Right after that, I also have:

```auto
System.useCodepage = true;

```

From what I have read on this and other sites, any one of these methods should allow the characters to show up, but it’s _still_ not working even when I use all of the above. I might be missing something obvious, but for now I’m thoroughly puzzled. Any ideas (other than using unicode escape characters, which I would really rather avoid)?

Thanks,  
C