How to view foreign language(i.e. Bangla) characters in CakePHP?

Question

Here's my code inside a .ctp file in CakePHP:

<div class="AccordionPanel">
        <div class="AccordionPanelTab">জন্ম নিবন্ধন</div>
        <div class="AccordionPanelContent">
            <?php echo $html->link(__('থানা', true), '/ReportBirthRegistrationStations/'); ?>
            <?php echo $html->link(__('অফিসার', true), '/ReportBirthRegistrationOfficers/'); ?>
         </div>
</div>

So it's pretty clear what I'm trying to do: I'm trying to write Bangla characters inside my view code in my CakePHP project, and I want to display them in my view page.

When I try to load the view page - weird, unreadable characters appear instead of Bangla characters.

I included this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

the UTF-8 encoding at the top of the file, but still it didn't work.

I included the UTF-8 encoding in view layout files as well, but still facing the problem.

How can I view Bangla or any other foreign characters in CakePHP? IS there any support in CakePHP for Bangla?

My IDE is Netbeans 8.0.1.

My CakePHP version is 1.2.5, and PHP version is 5.2 [due to working in a very old project that is being maintained since 2008-09]

Edit - 1:

I've tried adding the following -

-J-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8

in my netbeans.conf file in etc folder of my Netbeans installation folder. By doing that, I wanted to make sure that my file is saved in UTF-8 encoding. But my problem is still not solved.

Edit - 2:

Forgot to mention one important point. Whatever I'm trying to display, has nothing to do with my database values. These are just labels, I just want to view these labels in Bangla on page load.

Answer 1

Add this code to your ~/app/config/core.php file:

Configure::write('App.encoding', 'UTF-8');

And in your page section add:

 <?php echo $html->charset(); ?>