htmlentities destroys utf-8 strings

Question

I got something weird happening here and I can't understand why, on my php 5.2.5 server (Just on Linux ,Windows php servers doesn't have same problem) When I use a POST Form to post the content on an input containing "é" and on the other side I

echo(htmlentities($_POST["myinput"]))  

it echos é

But if I echo my

$_POST["myinput"]  

simply it shows "é", so this mean my htmlentities doesn't use UTF-8 by default, where can I change the Charset used by htmlentities?

I tried changing it in my php.ini default_charset = "UTF-8", but it won't work either?

Answer 1

htmlspecialchars($str, ENT_QUOTES, "UTF-8")

This is also better at preventing xss than just htmlentities()