The file name you're quoting here doesn't contain a 'j' at all, so even if all your encoding issues are fixed, you won't get a match. The \303\251 sequence is just an UTF-8 encoded é.

Please post a bit of your script so that we can see what you're actually doing. Missing characters are rather atypical for encoding problems (at least in that form).

Update: after thinking a bit more about your problem, I think your console/terminal might be b0rked. Can you enter and view accented characters on the command line? Are the entries of the file displayed correctly if you simply cat them to the console?