how to encode special carecters like German words ü ä   

Hi 
   We have a problem in encoding the text to German language and we are 
puling all the text from Resource files here while using Special characters 
like  é, à, Â, ü, ä, etc it is giving and error in the text format like we 
don’t get what is intended to get insted we get ü, ä etc 

   I tried to use <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; 
charset=UTF-8"> tag to solve the above problem but when I run the  page I get 
an error in the page ie all the spaces in the javascript is getting Encoded  
   

Regards
shashi

date: Fri, 9 Dec 2005 00:14:03 -0800   author:   shashi kumar shashi