Encoding mismatch between HTTP header and <meta> tag

[Mr Initial Man]

I validated my pages, and I ran into a major glitch.

The character encoding specified in the HTTP header (iso-8859-1) is different from the value in the <meta> element (utf-8).

Can I change the HTTP header somehow, or must I adjust the <meta> tag?

[Fang]

First line of the document:

<?php
header("content-type: text/html;charset=utf-8");
?>

or in .htaccess

[Mr Initial Man]

What if I have access to neither?

[Fang]

Ask (beg) the provider to do it.

[Mr Initial Man]

I've got a site posted in two places (one is Furtopia, the other is Furnation), and Furnation's got SQUAT for server-side support. That's why I asked.

I just switched over the encoding to iso-8859-1