Getting rid of HTML entities in a web title generated in PHP - php

Question

I have a website with the content management system GetSimple which is written in PHP. I edited it as I needed, however, in the header, this is what is supposed to be there:
<title><?php get_page_clean_title(); ?> - <?php get_site_name(); ?></title>
The problem is that I am Czech and I have to use special characters (á, é, í, ó, ú, ů, ě, š etc.) and if you opened my website and saw the source code, you would see this:
<title>Tomáš Janeček - osobní web - Tom**áš** Janeček | Personal Website</title>
Instead of "Tomáš Janeček - osobní web - Tom*áš* Janeček | Personal Website".
What is bothering me are those HTML entities, which are only in the second part of the title. á stands for "á" and š stands for "š".
I know it's supposed not to hurt SEO, but I'm doing this to keep the code clear.
Is there a way to decode it or just change the get_site_name() to some better function that would have no problems with these extra characters? I don't want the entities in my code.
I think that it's not this concrete .php file that should be edited to make it as I want it to be, however, I hope it could be solved somehow simply in this file.
The CMS includes tens of .php files and I'm not sure what should I search for. I've looked for some code with PHP entities in "suspicious" files but I found nothing that helped me.
If you need it, the whole CMS can be downloaded here
Thanks for your help in advance.
Edit1:// --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Of course I have this meta included.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
And no, I don't use any database. That will come with studying Joomla! :)
I want to emphasize that the title has 2 parts - get_page_clean_title() and get_site_name(), both of them include my whole name and only one displays it in the source code with HTML entities.
I have found the functions in another file:
The FIRST one is the one that doesn't put HTML entities into the source code - this is what I want from the second function lower.
function get_page_clean_title($echo=true) {
global $title;
$myVar = strip_tags(strip_decode($title));
if ($echo) {
echo $myVar;
} else {
return $myVar;
}
}
The SECOND function does what it is supposed to do, but it gives the output with HTML entities and that is the problem.
function get_site_name($echo=true) {
global $SITENAME;
$myVar = trim(stripslashes($SITENAME));
if ($echo) {
echo $myVar;
} else {
return $myVar;
}
}
Both of the functions above are in the same file.
I tried to replace the problematic function with the one working well with changing variables names to the right values, however, it stopped working at all :/
So, to conclude, the whole page is OK, there are no HTML entities except one place - the second half of the title with get_site_name function.
Furthermore, the problems is ONLY at the SOURCE CODE. The final displaying is okay.
Thanks for your replies so far, I'm glad for such fast and valuable replies. I really appreciate that.

Answer 1

I think you have a charset problem. If you want the special characters to display them in the right way, add
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
to your html/php file. Also check that your data is UTF-8 codified.
If you are getting your data from a MySQL database, check the columns use utf-8charset. Also set the charset for the connection with this query to ensure you are getting the data with the right codification.
set names utf8;

Answer 2

Tome, ensure that your *.php or database or whatever data is going off, is in UTF-8 and your meta charset on index is utf-8 also.
http://www.jakpsatweb.cz/cestina.html - Please visit this web for information about diacritics in html. You'll see the table of signs in each encoding.
How to save Russian characters in a UTF-8 encoded file