Those characters are part of a UTF-8 character set. To set the default character set via PHP, include the following line at the top of your page:
ini_set('default_charset','UTF-8');
Also, it may be redundant, but I also include the following HTML at the top of my pages:
<meta http-equiv='Content-Type' content='text/html; charset=utf-8'>
If your database query is not pulling the information you would expect, there are several factors:
1. table structure
2. how the variables are encoded in the table
3. how the variables are encoded in the query
If you are using the code I suggested, then Å will be changed to Å when stored in the variable (or, perhaps displayed in the report depending on how you have it set up). To reduce the risk of SQL injection it's important to use htmlentities() or something similar when using the variables in a query. However, if you need these characters displayed on the screen, you could use:
echo html_entity_decode($myvar,ENT_QUOTES,'utf-8');
Does that help?