Help With php include characters encoding

Hi there.
The php code widget works fine except that we’re having issues displaying special characters in the widget.

We are pulling in the text using an include file such as:

<?php include $_SERVER[‘DOCUMENT_ROOT’]. ‘/path-to-file/footer.php’; ?>

In the footer.php file we have some address information listed that uses a special character on a French street name.

I’ve attempted to add the following code to my include statement, but I’m really just hoping, without to much knowledge.

header(‘Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8’);

The pages of our site display the special characters ok, so the theme is ok, just not in the php widget.

I hope you can shed some light on this. Thanks

Paul

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/php-code-widget/