AS3 writeUTF vs writeMultiByte with diacriticals, curly quotes and other special characters

I'm working on an Air app that allows a user to modify blocks of video subtitle timecodes. The user can open an stl file, splits the file into an arrayCollection and puts it into a datagrid. They can then select a block of timecodes and adjust them based on the modified start time. This will be a huge timesaver since the film we had completed required a re-edit and we have thousands of subtitles that will now need to be changed as a result.

In any event, when the work is done the user can save the file to the system. In the save process, I naturally used the writeUTF() method but found that although it's supposed to save using utf-8 encoding, things like diacritics, question marks, curly apostrophes and quotes were broken in the resulting file.

So what should have looked like this: “This is a quote”
Looked like this: “This was a quoteâ€o

However, if you use the writeMultiByte() method and set the encoding to utf-8 it works perfectly.

So instead of : fileStream.writeUTF(myText);
try: fileStream.writeMultiByte(myText,"utf-8");

Since Google came up empty for search for the answer to this problem I though I would post this. Maybe it will help someone else....