Spanish characters and AJAX?

special characters in AJAX

[gavacho]

I have an AJAX script that displays the response provided by a PHP script that takes values from a MySQL database. It works fine with the English language, but text containing Spanish characters such as accented letters does not display properly. I am a javascript/ajax neophyte who has spent hours trying everything I can find on the internet to fix the problem to no avail. Could anyone tell me how I could change this AJAX script to make it work properly with Spanish language characters? Any help is greatly appreciated.

<script>
function loadurl(dest) {
 
 try {
 // Moz supports XMLHttpRequest. IE uses ActiveX.
 // browser detction is bad. object detection works for any browser
 xmlhttp = window.XMLHttpRequest?new XMLHttpRequest(): new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
 } catch (e) {
 // browser doesn't support ajax. handle however you want
 }
 
 // the xmlhttp object triggers an event everytime the status changes
 // triggered() function handles the events
 xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = triggered;
 
 // open takes in the HTTP method and url.
 xmlhttp.open("GET", dest);
 
 // send the request. if this is a POST request we would have
 // sent post variables: send("name=aleem&gender=male)
 // Moz is fine with just send(); but
 // IE expects a value here, hence we do send(null);
 xmlhttp.send(null);
}
function triggered() {
 // if the readyState code is 4 (Completed)
 // and http status is 200 (OK) we go ahead and get the responseText
 // other readyState codes:
 // 0=Uninitialised 1=Loading 2=Loaded 3=Interactive
 if ((xmlhttp.readyState == 4) && (xmlhttp.status == 200)) {
 // xmlhttp.responseText object contains the response.
 document.getElementById("output").innerHTML = xmlhttp.responseText;
 }
}
</script>

I display the output like this:

<!--Loaded files go in Div below -->
<div id="output">
</div>
<!--End of loaded file Div -->

[DrDoc]

How do Spanish characters display? And, these should probably be converted to applicable HTML Entities on the server side prior to responding to your script.