jquery - .load() kills character encoding

Question

I'm using the following code to load in content:

<script type="text/javascript">
    jQuery.noConflict();
    jQuery(document).ready(function(){
        jQuery('.content-div').load("all-events.html");     
    });
</script>

However the content is loaded in without the special characters that I want in UTF-8. It was mentioned somewhere to put this at the top of my code:

$html = header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8'); 

However I only got this error: 'header is not defined'.

Answer 1

Thanks for the help everyone, however I found what was the problem. The problem was that adding headers to a basic text file didn't change its actual encoding. I wrote that file in notepad and had no way of checking if the encoding was correct. I then opened it in Notepad++ and set the encoding from that application. Hope that helps to others struggling with this problem :)