I ultimately have a MySQL database I'm connecting to, but for clarity's sake, I've reproduced the issue just using the windows command prompt. Simply run this command:
php -r "echo 'á' . PHP_EOL;"
And the output ends up being "ß" rather than "á" as I would expect. I'm sure this is some sort of encoding issue, but PHP is not my "native" language and I am really confused as to what is going on here.
Thanks for any clarification you all can give.
PHP Version: 5.5.11