Question marks when execute arabic letters in php - php

Question

I want to build simple page to get exam results from university server.
First I built a form that send student number to university server and take you to university page. Here is the code:
<form action="https://exam.albaath-univ.edu.sy/exam-med/re.php" method="post" accept-charset="UTF-8">
<p style="text-align: center;">
<input name="number1" type="hidden" value="" />
<input name="nospy" type="hidden" value="" />
</p>
<table>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>choose field</td>
<td>
<select name="nospy">
<option value="1">Med</option>
</select>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>enter your number</td>
<td style="text-align: right;"><input name="number1" size="20" type="text" /></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td colspan="2" align="center"><input type="submit" value="show result" /></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</form>
This code works perfectly.. The next step I tried to do is to make the form redirect to another page on my website. This page contains php code that take the information the send it to university server then get the response and print it in same page without going to university page.
The code was like this:
<?php
if ($_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] == 'POST') {
$nospy = $_POST['nospy'];
$number1 = $_POST['number1'];
// send the information to another PHP page using cURL
$url = 'https://example.com/other_page.php';
$post_data = array(
'nospy' => $nospy,
'number1' => $number1
);
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, http_build_query($post_data));
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
$response = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
// process the response from the other PHP page
// convert it to the Windows-1256 encoding
$response = iconv("UTF-8", "Windows-1256", $response);
// display the converted response in HTML
echo $response;
}
?>
This code also worked but the problem is that the results contains arabic names and php still give question marks instead of arabic letters.. I tried many solutions like converting text to utf-8 and window-1256 encoding... it doesnt work.. can anyone help
I need the results to support arabic letters

Answer 1

please try adding the following to the header to the returned output.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />