Doctrine - loading a YAML fixture with French characters, replaces the accents with junk

Hi,

My Doctrine 1.2 is integrated inside CodeIgniter as a hook and I know that my char-set is utf8 with collation utf8_unicode_ci.

I have two YAML files, one for creating the DB and its tables and one to load some test data. My data can contain French accents (çéïë...). In my schama.yml I have correctly specified the collation and char-set:

options:
type: INNODB
charset: utf8
collate: utf8_unicode_ci

I double checked the settings in phpMyAdmin, everything is correct.

When I run my doctrine script from commandline to load my fixture to populate one of tables, all the French accents are replaced by junk!

Am I missing a setting or configuration or is there a bug in Doctrine?

I appreciate any help. Cheers.

P.S. Everything else works like a charm