Be aware of the encoding of your source files!!!
Some of the suggestions here make reference to workarounds where you hard-code an encoding.
<?php
echo htmlspecialchars('<b>Wörmann</b>'); ?>
As it turns out, it may actually be your text editor that is to blame.
As of PHP 5.4, htmlspecialchars now defaults to the UTF-8 encoding. That said, many text editors default to non-UTF encodings like ISO-8859-1 (i.e. Latin-1) or WIN-1252. If you change the encoding of the file to UTF-8, the code above will now work (i.e. the ö is encoded differently in UTF-8 and ISO-8859-1, and you need the UTF-8 version).
Make sure you are editing in UTF-8 Unicode mode! Check your UI or manual for how to convert files to Unicode. It's also a good idea to figure out where to look in your UI to see what the current file encoding is.
