Site Trick

If you're printing out variables directly to the browser that have non-english text you will probably see unreadable gibberish. This is probably not the encoding process, such as Xpath, that you may be using but just your browser. The real character is still there, but your browser is translating it incorrectly. So all you need to do is tell the browser what character set to use.

In PHP Just use:
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

or you may use the equivalent meta tag:
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=utf-8">

So ultimately it wasn't the encoding but the default browser setting.