I am using PHP Simple HTML DOM Parser http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/ to fetch data like Page Title, Meta Description and Meta Tags from other domains and
http://simplehtmldom.sourceforge.net/
I had the same problem with Romanian characters. Nothing worked until I used
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-2');
ISO-8859-2 being the character set for Eastern European letters. So find the right character set for your language and use it in header.