How to decode these characters? á é í - character-encoding

Question

I'm querying the MediaWiki API to get Wikipedia data into my Filemaker database. When I load the data into a browser, the characters show up properly but when it comes into Filemaker, characters with diacriticals get converted to these odd characters: á is converted to √° (square root symbol + degree symbol), é is converted to √© (square root symbol + copyright symbol), í is converted to √≠ (square root symbol + not equals symbol) and more. What character encoding is that? Thank you!!

Answer 1

As #Joni suggests in his comment, this is UTF-8 misinterpreted as MacRoman. Letter á is C3 A1 (hex.) in UTF-8, and C3 is “√” in MacRoman, A1 is “°”. So you should just try to set the program to interpret the data as UTF-8.

Answer 2

I'm sure this isn't the full list, but it did what I needed. Here is a lookup for the codes:
√© é e
√° á a
√≠ í i
√≥ ó o
√∂ ö o
√º ü u
√¥ ô o
√® è e
√ß ç c
√± ñ n
√∏ ø o
√´ ë e
√§ ä a
√• å a
√Å Á A
√∫ ú u
√ª û u
√Ø ï i
√â É E
√† à a
√¶ æ ae
√Æ î i
√¢ â a
√£ ã a
√î Ô O
√ü ß ss
√ì Ó O
√≤ ò o
√Ω ý y
√ñ Ö O
√™ ê e
√Ä À A
√ò Ø O
√Ö Å A
√∞ ð eth
√á Ç C
√Ç Â A
√π ù u
√í Ò O
√¨ ì i
√ú Ü U
√à È E
√û Þ Th

Answer 3

You're all correct about the misinterpreted characters, the Troi URL FMP plugin I was using to set FMP's user agent (as MediaWiki API requires) was responsible for pulling in the garbled characters. Solution was to bypass the plugin: FMP script performs Applescript "do shell script curl -A" to set user agent and query API and pull response back into FMP and all characters come through properly!