PHP/AJAX character encoding

[marc_gfx]

I'm trying to transmit binary data via AJAX. The binary data is stored in a normal string, so it's not really binary anymore, but it results in the string containing weird characters.

I save the transmitted data in PHP to a file, that I later want to be able to load again via AJAX.

//string in Javascript
È'
marcgfx"ÏÿP…:e5ÿÿÿPesce

to transmit I use escape(txt)

//what gets stored in the file
something that looks chinese, only very few characters compared to the original, so it looks like one character uses multiple bytes

//result (both loaded from file, or echoed in the receiving file of ajax request)
�'
marcgfx"��P�:e5���Pesce

any idea what I could be doing wrong? to me it looks like an encoding issue.

The binary data is fine by the way, I just can't get the same string back that I originally sent. I've set headers in both php and html to utf-8, i've set php's mbstring to utf-8, can't think of much else right now.

[marc_gfx]

yay... found a solution. I had to utf8_encode the string. seems pointless as I've already set everything I could to utf8, but it works...