php with special characters like ñ

for me

$test = "Nuñez";
echo $test;

shows Nuñez

You may try

$test = "Nuñez";
echo utf8_decode($test);

or

$test = utf8_encode("Nuñez");
echo utf8_decode($test);

Try this

Its works for me.

$test = "Nuñez";

echo html_entity_decode(htmlentities($test));

to show correctly latin characters like ñ Ñ á é í ó ú, etc.. in browsers, you have to use iso-8859-1 instead of UTF-8 encoding http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp

best regards!