Error with the province (state) and the phone number data

I'm located in Quebec, a french province of Canada so the website is in french and in french, Quebec needs an accent. It's wrote "Québec". All the data from the customer is copied to the PayPal without any problem, even if the city name has an Accent. For example, The city I lives in is called "Prévost", and it's copied on PayPal. But not the province... Paypal receive the data but the customer need to pick the province in a drop down list when it arrive on the PayPal Page.

I use a dropdown list to show the choice of Canadian province in the creation account page. I first suspect the data from the zen_zones tablee in the database since the the zone_name field "Québec" was associated to "QC" in the zone_code field and maybe Paypal wasn't recognize it that way. So I change the data in the zone_code field with "Quebec" without accent, "Québec", "Québec" (where "é" is the code for "é" in PHP)... Also tried with "Québec" since Québec was wrote that way in the zone_name field in the database... none of these worked. I still always have to mannualy enter the province when I'm in the PayPal Page checkout page.

I'm not really sure the phone number of the customer is suppose to be copied on the PayPal checkout page but if it's suppose to, it doesn't either.

Any idea? Do these info all shouldn't be copied to PayPal Checkout page??

A Google search for PayPal and checkout with special characters wasn't very supportive. It's reasonable to believe that passing normal characters is the standard so 'quebec' would need to be sent as 'quebec' not 'qu´bec'.

ZC could also send 'QC' as the zone field, and paypal receives it correctly but their checkout page is only coded to display 'Quebec'. If it's only the PayPal page you need to show the special characters on, you'll need to contact PayPal...

My guess is that there's a mismatch between the character set your store is displaying (as set by /includes/languages/french.php and /YOUR_ADMIN/includes/languages/french.php) and your database is saving (as set by /includes/configure.php and /YOUR_ADMIN/includes/configure.php).

Within the two french.php files, would you post the @locale statements. I've posted the values from the spanish.php file for my multi-lingual site that displays UTF-8 and has a UTF8 database (using utf8_general_ci collation):

  @setlocale(LC_TIME, 'es_ES.UTF-8');
  @setlocale(LC_TIME, 'Spanish_Spain.1252');//for windows  

Also, please post the DB_CHARSET-setting statements from the configure.php files. If you are able to, one additional check would be to use phpMyAdmin to look at your database to see what collation your database is set for. When I look at the "Structure" of the address_book table, for example, the character-type fields all show a "Collation" of utf8_general_ci.