How do I load extended (accented) ascii characters from text files?

Whenever I try to enter data into text fields using either the load
statement on an ascii file or an insert statement that has extended ascii
(accented) characters in the range of 128 to 154 and then try to examine the
data stored in MySQL I get gobbledegook characters. When I enter this same
data from within the MySQL command line interface (in Windows 2K) the data
displays correctly.


I am quite concerned about this because I am starting to build a PHP
application
that will take input from HTML forms and put them into the database using
INSERT statements and I don't want to have this happen there.

Can someone suggest how I might correctly load this data from external text
files?

Examples of the lines stored in the external text file are:

insert into artists (ArtistCode,ArtistID,Artist) values('real',229,'Real
Bérard');
insert into artists (ArtistCode,ArtistID,Artist) values('rene',147,'René
Lauthier');

thanks for your help,
                                    Bob Bruce, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada