Charset problem when creating text file from database

[bike5]

I have a database that is correctly storing characters like the trademark symbol, copyright, ect. I then pull data from the database and generate a normal text file from it. I do not do anything other then echoing out the direct database info into a variable and then building the file from the variable. When I open the text file, ALL my trademarks, copyright, apostrophies, anything other then alphanumeric becomes question marks. "?" I have no idea how to fix this. Can anyone lead me in the right direction on what needs to be done to fix this. The database charset is 8859-1 I beleive, and my html pages are also 8859-1 and also render the data wrong, same "?" put everywhere. Any help would be great, thank you for your time.

[drew010]

maybe try
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF8" />

[bike5]

Sorry let me be more descriptive, the text file I am creating is an XML file. I have been reading and it says all the unicode's don't support all the symbols, so is there a function or converter that has been written for this? Thanks.