In order to be able to show French characters in the XML, which contains a dataset with several records, I have added this at the beginning:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1" standalone="yes" ?>

This works well on my development PC, which has a full server simulation of the production environment. But, when the same file is sent from the server, all the French characters are replaced by other characters. Can someone explain me why this encoding works only locally and what should be done to have a universal way of displaying those characters?