I've looked at all the relevant topics on the site and this particular gotcha does not seem to be covered
I exported a Word 2016 document (in French) as filtered HTML ( filtered= no office specific stuff included). If I show the file in my browser as html, everything is fine - all the accents show correctly. ( Charset is utf-8 and it's not coming from a database). But when I change the extension to .php and run it, all the french characters are shown as black diamonds with a question mark inside.
If I express the french characters as html entities, they show correctly, but I don't want to do this as the fix - there are hundreds of them in there, and I don't want to edit the text - it's not mine and the author would have to proof read it all again just to check the accents.
So I figured it's a PHP (5.5.26) issue - but I can't see anything in the ini file which might affect this - it looks like UTF-8 is the default charset if you don't change anything,
What's the fix ??