upload changes accented character

I've built a system which uploads a tab-delimited text file saved from Excel, then uses the text file to update a MySQL database. But when the text file contains an "é" character (confirmed by viewing in a text editor before uploading), the character is converted to some other weird character -- a capital Z with what looks like an inverted circumflex accent above it. This replacement character is stored in the database and output to HTML pages. It doesn't matter if I use htmlentites() on the data before storing in MySQL, the weird Z character is still what's written to the database. And I'm not able to do a string replacement to make it "é" again (or "é"), because when I paste the weird accented Z character into a PHP file and save, the character is converted into " }" (a space and closing bracket). Perhaps this isn't a PHP problem, but can anyone point me towards a solution? Setup is PHP 4.3.2 on FreeBSD 4.10, Apache 1.3.27. TIA -- Lowell Allen