In my cakephp website special character was replaced by "�". But not in the layout.
I have already tried:
- apache is configured to serve utf-8
- converted database to utf8_general_ci collation
- first line of bootstrap.php: header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');
- core.php: Configure::write('App.encoding', 'UTF-8');
- in database.php: 'encoding' => 'utf8' while creating database connection
- in layout : $this->Html->charset();