Q:

French characters encoding issues è is displayed as Ã¨ in java

I am using a html form to input strings in French. When I read the strings on the server side (Java), some French characters don't get displayed properly.
For example, 
è has turned to Ã¨
I am testing this feature in two servers. This is working in one (local windows server), but the issue is happening in the remote server with the same code.
Could you please provide some clues as to where I should look ?
Form header
<form accept-charset="UTF-8" method="post" name="dd_add_cat_form" id="dd_add_cat_form">

HTML header in both servers
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
< RlogId: wf.rbcbq672%3F%3CVB%28USD5%3E44-13eb39c8a7e
< Cache-Control: no-cache
< Pragma: no-cache
< Content-Type: text/html;charset=UTF-8
< Content-Length: 2619
< Date: Fri, 17 May 2013 17:49:40 GMT

A:

Probably the default charset on the two servers is different.
Then there is some code that is decoding using the default char set which matches in one case and not in the other. Look in the java code for something decoding with the default character code.
For example:
byte[] bytes = ....;
String s = new String(bytes); // uses the default

but this one doesn't use the default
String s = new String(bytes, "UTF-8"); // uses the supplied charset

