Special characters for Spanish

[Dan Healy]

I am entering Spanish characters (example: á, ñ, etc.) using the Compose key and writing them to a mySQL table.  I then retrieve them and compare them to an identical character entered into a text area on a web page.  They appear identical on the web page, but they don't compare equal .

When I enter a special character for Spanish it is rendered as more than one character in code but appears as one special character on the web page.  When I view the source code for the web page I can see the multiple characters for each entry and they are different.

I had been using Ubuntu 12.04 and upgraded to 14.04.  The code apparently worked with 12.04 but does not work with 14.04.

I can't tell if I have introduced a change in  my code, if there has been the change in the Ubuntu release, or an upgrade to Firefox, or some other problem.

Any ideas how I might address this problem?  The code is several years old and has been used extensively but now fails.  I am looking for an approach to handling this problem.  I can provide screen shots of the code and the web page.  Any help would really be appreciated.

Thanks, Dan H