How to set UTF-8 encoding for a PHP file

I have a PHP script called :

http://cyber-flick.com/apiMorpho.php?method=getMorphoData&word=kot

That displays some data in plain text:

Cz��� mowy: rzeczownik
Przypadek: dope�niacz
Rodzaj: şe�ski
Liczba: mnoga

As you can see in place of proper chars there are so “bushes”. What i would like to do is display this in a way so that people see in browser proper UTF-8 characters.

You can encapsulate it in HMTL tags and set in meta UTF-8 encoding, but because the data received from this script will be processed further I don’t want to use any HTML tags, it should be only plain text result set.

So is there a way to inform browser that this file is UTF-8 without using meta tags?

PS. File is encoded in UTF-8 and if I manually change charset encoding in my browser to UTF-8 it displays ok, but what I want to acomplish is people to not be required to do so.

Answer

header('Content-type: text/plain; charset=utf-8');