Possible Duplicate:
PHP htmlentities() not working as expected
I'm confused as to why it is converted into strange characters as opposed to just ´ Can anyone point me in the right direction?
Use the second flags argument - http://php.net/manual/en/function.htmlentities.php, e.g.
htmlentities( $string, ENT_QUOTES | ENT_SUBSTITUTE, "UTF-8" );