special characters, again

I see this subject has been dealt with many times, but I need help on the specific fix. I have many characters like é -- so it is not HTML but something else. é renders as a "square box" in the grid. it is part of a name string. The field is col 0 and presently treated as:

var number = new AW.Formats.Number;
obj.setCellFormat(str, 0);
obj.setCellFormat(str, 1);

how should this be changed to render correctly?

Thank you.

I guess the problem is related to page encoding. If your data comes from XML or CSV (via XMLHttpRequest) then the page must be in UTF-8.