Special Characters in emails ( á, é, í, ó, ú & ? )

I am at my wits end about how to get the emails from WP to include these special characters. In the example below, I want to achieve “hów” in the email and the actual code has no spaces, but I couldn’t find another way to keep this page from showing it how I wish my email would. I tried all of the following to no avail:

1)

$message = sprintf(__('h & # 2 4 3 ; w')) . "rn";
Result: h & # 2 4 3 ; w [no spaces]

2)

$message = sprintf(__('h & o a c u t e ; w')) . "rn";
Result: h & o a c u t e ; w [no spaces]

3)

$message = sprintf(__('hów')) . "rn";
Result: hw

WTF, mates? Anyone?

Also, I would like to fix the ‘from’ field in the email header. I tried adding this (which I stole from the install.php file since it sent me my admin login the way I wanted), again to no avail:

$message_headers = ‘From: ‘ . stripslashes($_POST[‘Pretty Name’]) . ‘ <[email protected]>’;

Anyone?

Thanks,
Peace out.