If the "page" in it self is encoded with ISO-8859-1 then you need the information and subsequent pages that you bring into that page to be in that encoding as well.

Otherwise the browser will get confused and not render the page correctly.

So if your page is ISO-8859-1 encoded and your data in the database is UTF-8 encoded for example. Then you would have to use utf8_decode() on the data you get from your database before you display it in the ISO-8859-1 encoded page.
And the same goes for the other way around. but then you would use utf8_encode().

I hade some of these problems once and it took some time to figure out what was wrong.

One more thing to think about. it´s not enough to set your header and DOCTYPE to reflect the encoding make sure your editor(IDE) actually saves the page with the correct encoding. or otherwise there might be trouble there also.

Hope this helps.

/EyeDentify

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