How to troubleshoot this on a Windows system
On Windows, you can use Notepad++ to enter Unicode characters correctly. After launching Notepad++, select 'Encoding in UTF-8 without BOM' from the 'Encoding' menu, then type your Unicode characters and save the file.
To make sure that the characters have been saved properly, download a hex editor for Windows and make sure that
é is saved as
c3 89 and
à is saved as
Previous response where I assumed that you are on a Linux system
Most likely the Unicode characters have not been saved properly in .htaccess file.
What do you get when you try this command:
grep -o .x.mple .htaccess | od -t x1 -c
You should get this if your Unicode characters are saved correctly.
0000000 c3 a9 78 c3 a0 6d 70 6c 65 0a 65 78 61 6d 70 6c
303 251 x 303 240 m p l e \n e x a m p l
0000020 65 0a
If you have
hd installed, you can get a neater output to do your troubleshooting:
$ grep -o .x.mple .htaccess | xxd -g1
0000000: c3 a9 78 c3 a0 6d 70 6c 65 0a 65 78 61 6d 70 6c ..x..mple.exampl
0000010: 65 0a e.
In all the outputs you can see that
é is saved as the binary numbers:
c3 89. You can see from http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/e9/index.htm that the
é when encoded in UTF-8 is indeed two-bytes: 0xC3 and 0xA9.
à in UTF-8 format is: 0xC3 0xA0. See http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/e0/index.htm. You can see these codes in the output as well.