datagrid won't display or update fields containing french characters

[flish]

Hello

This problem is probably very simple, but I cannot seem to find the fix.
My database has tables that contain french characters - datagrid does not display those fields, but it does display the fields that contain no special chars. The tables are all utf-8.
Anything else I should do?

Thanks,
flish
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Edit:
The problem seems to be on tables that already contain data. If I introduce a French text using the datagrid and the table was empty to start with, then all goes well.
What datagrid writes inside the table is a different question altogether. This is what a test string looks like:
TEST  téàùè
I wouldn't mind it very much, except that it makes for awkward manipulation later on. And the data will be used by apps other than easyUI suite.

[stworthy]

Providing a simple example to demonstrate this issue may be more appropriate.