How can you change the output encoding for joomla?

If you need your output encoding set to UTF-8 instead of Joomla's default iso-8859-1 just go to your current language file and search for :

DEFINE('_ISO','charset=iso-8859-1');

 

you can change it to

DEFINE('_ISO','charset=utf-8');

 

of course this helps only if you have content with UTF-8 encoding...