Hi All,
The Problem:
Most of the strings in Hebrew, written in .php files, are output as question marks.
Old hosting:
CENTOS
everything is fine.
PHP version there is 5.2.9
DB data is output fine.
New Hosting:
CENTOS
PHP version there is 5.3
Most of the strings in Hebrew, written in .php files, are output as question marks.
Re-fetching the file did not help, tried scp and wget.
Copy-paste the code into the file over SSH - helps. This does not change file encoding.
Encoding of the problematic files UTF8. Line endings are fine.
Apache serves UTF8.
Meta tag set to UTF8.
Php default charset UTF8.
Browser detects UTF8.
YII encoding explicitly set to UTF8.
Everything is UTF8, but still most of the strings in Hebrew, written in .php files, are output as question marks.
If trying to debug, setting die(‘שלום’) in the problematic file shows 
? (question marks).
Taking a problematic file, adding .txt to it and checking it via browser results in fine chars.
Taking this file out of YII and rendering it (as .php) results in fine chars.
It looks to me as YII problem, but I don’t know where to look… the only thing I can think of is debugging the core of YII to find where the text becomes corrupted…But it can take years.
Anyone who can advise is welcome!
Avi