[Exist-open] character output issues

[Eric H. <e.h...@uc...>]

Greetings all...

I'm working on a project using eXist to store descriptions of old
Norse and Icelandic manuscripts. These contain lots of special
characters, although with the right fonts installed rendering them is
usually no problem. However, I have been having some issues with these
in my eXist setup. My local development setup is WinXP / Apache 1.3.27 / 
eXist 1.0b2 / PHP 4.3.3. I'm
using PHP XQuery and XSLT extensions to run the queries and process the
output (http://query-exist.sourceforge.net/ and
http://phpxmlclasses.sourceforge.net/). All of the source files are in
UTF-8.

When uploading files to the database, many character entities are parsed
into those little rectangles one sees on Windows systems rather than the 
characters themselves. I know the characters are ok though as I can cut 
and paste them into a text editor and they come out fine. When retrieved 
by PHP however, the rectangles are replaced by the dreaded question 
marks '?' in the outputted text. One character in particular that has 
been giving me fits
is U+01EB - ǫ [LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH OGONEK], but there are 
quite a few others. This renders
just fine on it's own with Lucida Unicode but won't output from the
database. I have tried a few different strategies for dealing with this
but with little success. I'm aware that PHP has no native Unicode
support and that this might be the source of the problem. Does anyone
have any advice for dealing with this issue?

Many thanks,
Eric