Issues with tidy and utf-8 encoding

Hi list, this is my first post and I've only been lurking around these premises for the past week. I've been running into some strange issues with tidy. When I try and output my HTML in utf-8 all the accentuated characters come out as total gobbledeegook. I've have no issues echoing a string via utf8_encode(), the browser picks up the right encoding and everything comes out fine. The only workaround I've found so far is this : $tidy = new tidy; $tidy->parseString(utf8_encode($html), $config, 'utf8'); $tidy->cleanRepair(); echo $tidy; Which is really dodgy if you ask me. Has anyone run into the same kind of problem before? I've set a meta tag as follows, but that seems to be modified by tidy on the fly if ever the used encoding differs from the one indicated in the meta tag. <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> Any help would be greatly appreciated. Cheers, Youri