Special Character Problem

[Gimp]

I'm having a problem with special characters that maybe someone can help me with.

I'm hard coding a string in a table and trying to compare it to other strings I get from chat text. The problem I run into is when the string has special characters.

For instance, I have "Tham Mírdain" as one of my hard coded strings. If I print it to screen, it comes out as "Tham M?rdain". However, when I catch "Tham Mírdain" in my chat text, place it in a variable and print it to screen, it prints correctly. Comparing Tham M?rdain to Tham Mírdain isn't going to work.

Any ideas on why it is doing this and how to fix it?