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.

Solution 1:

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

Solution 2:

Also note that setting a header to "text/plain" will result in all html and php (in part) printing the characters on the screen as TEXT, not as HTML. So be aware of possible HTML not parsing when using text type plain.

Using:

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

Can return HTML and PHP as well. Not just text.