Creating .xml file with file_put_contents and german chars????

Hi all,

I am having problems with creating a .xml file with german characters, like ü, ö.
which i parse with flash

If i have the following in content-de.xml

 <pageTitle><![CDATA[über]]></pageTitle>

Code (markup):

it works allright

but when i edit the xml file and make another xml node

	$content = $xml->asXML();
	$content = str_replace('<pageTitle>','<pageTitle><![CDATA[',trim($content));
	$content = str_replace('</pageTitle>',']]></pageTitle>',trim($content));
	
	$content =  html_entity_decode($content);

	$res = file_put_contents("content-".$lang.".xml", $content);

Code (markup):

the content-de.xml title node looks the same, but in flash it is parse something like ü.

Now apparently php function file_put_contents() adds something to the xml file???

I have copied all the code from the .xml created with file_put_contents() into the "handmade" xml file and it works correctly. So it has to do with the way file_put_contents creates the .xml

How can i fix this??

ps: i am looking into iconv function, but no luck yet