>I am just defining a small XML file that contains some French characters. I can't view it in IE if this is the case. Anyone found a workaround for that?

I do a strtran to replace the UTF-8 with ISO encoding so that IE can display it

STRTRAN(lcXMLString),"UTF-8","iso-8859-1")

Here are some explanations of UTF-8 vs ISO
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#utf-8
http://czyborra.com/charsets/iso8859.html#ISO-8859-1