I searched through StackOverFlow and found similar questions but nothing that answered my particular situation so I thought of asking this as a new question.
When i insert entries into the database form a textbox, i use mysql_real_escape_string(); and then when i display the information i use htmlspecialchars();
I use UTF-8 as the charset. We are using HTML5 formatting. The collation for the database was by default set to latin1_swedish_ci, so i used that. For all the tables its set to latin1_swedish_ci. For all the fields in the table we use utf8_general_ci.
As an example, this is how it looks when its shown:
�Who are you?� he asked his iPhone. �I am a humble
personal assistant,� the device replied, bringing the biggest...
How do i fix this?
Your problem is the collation setting, make sure it is one of the utf8 ones (like utf8_general_ci) for database, tables and text fields.
Furthermore make sure that you are setting your connection charset to UTF-8 as well :
SET NAMES utf8;