With version 4.5 TYPO3 switch completely to UTF8. As a first step, all files are UTF8-encoded now (in trunk). There was a mixup of encodings before, and we want to have one encoding for all files.
Be sure to prepare your IDE for this encoding, see the attached pictures how to do this in Zend / Eclipse / Netbeans.
As next step we will set defaults for database to UTF8 as well, this will happen hopefully in alpha2 release of 4.5.
With these steps we hope to ensure that encoding errors will not happen anymore, but there is still some work to do to reach this final step.
Thanks for your attention.
Good to see one character encoding for all files. Will make life easier.