title: Why are non-ASCII characters displayed as weird symbols?
body: <p>I have two cases here:</p>
  <p>My database contains a lot of information which I want to fetch to the page. Some of this information is <em>name</em> which contain non-ASCII characters like <code>Uwe Rülke</code></p>
  <p><strong>- Old solution which works well:</strong></p>
  <p>I fetch the data from the database and populate the page directly from a <strong>VB</strong> <code>while</code> loop. In this case all the chars are displaying correctly <code>Uwe Rülke</code>.</p>
  <p><strong>- New solution which doesn't work properly:</strong></p>
  <p>The VB <code>While</code> loop doesn't throw the data directly to the page, rather in a JavaScript strings (to enhance performance by not calling the database each now and then). But when I used the information stored in the JavaScript variables, I got something like this: <code>Uwe R�lke</code>.</p>
  <p>In both cases, the page's encoding is:</p>
  <pre><code>&lt;meta http-equiv=&quot;Content-Type&quot; content=&quot;text/html; charset=iso-8859-1&quot;&gt;
  </code></pre>
  <BR>
  Where did I go wrong?
  <hr/>
  <p>This is the code used to fetch (from the database) and then save to JavaScript strings.</p>
  <p>I'm using <code>AJAX LOAD</code> from a page called <code>ISEquery</code> to build a specific request and query it from the database. It is used to either fetch data as an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Excel" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Excel</a> file or as plain <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML" rel="nofollow noreferrer">HTML</a>. <strong>At this point the characters are well represented.</strong></p>
  <p>Then the magic happens, and the characters get mis-represented. I checked it in the <code>exctractFields</code> function:</p>
  <pre><code>$(&quot;&lt;div&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&quot;).load(&quot;ISEquery.asp?isExcel=0&amp;&quot; + info, function(){
                              // Extracting the fields into an array
                              var rows = &quot;&quot;;
                              var options = &quot;&quot;;
                              $(this).children().each(function(index){
                                  var fieldsArray = exctractFields($(this).html());
                                  rows += createISELine(fieldsArray);
                                  options += createISELine_ComboBox(fieldsArray);
                              });
                          });
  </code></pre>