Why non-ascii chars are displayed as weird symbols?

Question

I have 2 cases here:

My Database contains lots of info which I want to fetch to the page, some of these info are name which contain non-ascii chars like Uwe Rü

Answer 1

Thanks to Aaron Digulla's answer, I followed the string from server to the page and found that it is gets misrepresented after the AJAX LOAD, so I found this answer which resolved my problem. Although I had to use the charset="iso-8859-1" for it to work rather than charset="UTF-8".

So the final answer is:

-Encoding in the HTML page:

-Encoding the Ajax data:

 $.ajaxSetup({
          'beforeSend' : function(xhr) {
           xhr.overrideMimeType('text/html; charset=iso-8859-1');
        },
    });

And now chars are displayed correctly. Thanx for your help guys..