Beware, now default_charset in PHP 5.6 is UTF-8, instead of blank value like in previous versions. So if you use 8-bit charset like iso-8859-1 then your non-ascii characters will be broken until you explicitly set default_charset to blank value or to your actual character set. HTML meta tag doesn't work anymore because HTTP headers have more proirity over them. And Apache AddDefaultCharset directive has lower proirity too.