Strange behaviour of shell_exec

[Don]

Hi,

I have a problem with the special characters on the function shell_exec
(under Linux Debian with php 4.3.10-16):

$msg = '"'."Léà t'es où?".'"';

$output = shell_exec('jav a myClass'.' '.$msg);

All the special characters in $msg like é or à are turned into the
strange characters with shell_exec function. Whereas under the shell if
I type :

java myClass "Léà t'es où?"

It works fine with all the special characters.

Is there a way to walk arround this problem?

Thank you in avance

Don